Timeless: Live in Concert (2001)

Picture this: a television screen filled with an image of a mature woman's hand holding the hand of an adolescent girl. Then those hands--and their owners, Barbra Streisand and 15-year-old look-alike and singing sensation Lauren Frost--ascend a flight of stairs that leads (suggestively, at least) to destiny itself. A third of the way up, Barbra releases her surrogate child-self... and watches as the latter climbs the rest of the way, disappearing into her future of possibilities. Wow. Who else but Streisand could still pull off such an audacious moment of sentimental psychodrama, the way that only a true star could? Yet nestled within the autobiographical meringue of the legendary singer's Millennium's-End concert, performed at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas on December 31, 1999, that scene--and many other such self-referential moments reliving the sundry chapters of Streisand's life and career--is quite moving in its laid-bare honesty. A fuller experience than listening to the double CD of the concert, this video record of a magical night (does anyone remember our collective Y2K anxieties that New Year's Eve?) provides the most bang for the buck when it comes to reliving all those special scenes: surprise guest appearances (Barry Gibb, Bryan Adams, Neil Diamond, and Streisand's son, Jason Gould), duets with Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra (via video footage, of course), an appearance by dance master Savion Glover as Brother Time, a humorous bit with Shirley MacLaine, and several collaborations with Frost. If Timeless: Live from the MGM Grand was indeed, as Streisand claimed, the first step of a short farewell tour that ended in early 2000, it was the perfect way to exit the stage forever. --Tom Keogh