In front of the house is a stone wall, above the wall is an iron grating, above the grating is a chain link fence, and behind the fence is an opaque thicket of trees. To get inside, you talk into a little intercom, and if you pass muster, the electric gate—the Starland equivalent of a draw- bridge—swings silently open. I pass muster. Inside, I wait briefly in a large white study containing a white piano and a white poodle.
The white ashtrays have white match boxes, and the white pencils on the white desk have white erasers. In walks the woman who has been compared, at various points in her career, to an ancient oracle, a Babylonian queen, a vampire, a toadstool, a truffle, a martin, a hamster, an anteater, the Aswan Dam and a plate of hot pastrami.
At five feet five, with squiggly blond hair, scant makeup, and what her former lover Jon Peters describes as "a foxy little body with a great ass," she bears no obvious resemblance to any of these items. She wears a work shirt and Jeans and looks at least 10 years younger than her age, which is The original sound track uses only instruments common in Eastern Europe in , when the movie takes place: violins, cellos, wooden flutes, panpipes, zithers.
To alchemize the music into potential Top Forty gold, some of the songs have been reorchestrated with electric pianos, electric basses, drums and synthesizers. Streisand goes to the Lion Share recording studio every day and sits at an enormous console with two dozen levers, one for each instrument. She raises the volume of the violins a little on this phrase, softens the brass on that one.
Suddenly the white room is filled with a sound that seems to come straight from the sky, not from the Lion Share studio. It rises, falls, bends the tempo to the lyrics like audible taffy.
Meanwhile, the real Streisand paces up and down with her hands in her pockets, a small figure set against the super- human backdrop of her. Then, more anxiously, "Is it better in the movie? Barbra Streisand acted in Yentl, directed it, coproduced it, and co- wrote the screenplay—the first woman in history to take such complete control of a film.
She appears in virtually every scene and is also the sole singer of the movie's 12 songs. The story of a young Polish girl named Yentl who disguises herself as a boy in order to pursue Talmudic studies at a yeshiva, the film began life as a page tale by Isaac Bashevis Singer called "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.
In she read it aloud to Jon Peters, the hairdresser-businessman who is now a producer, during the first weekend they spent together, and told him, "Someday I'm going to make this. She had so much passion for it. Peddling the film to Hollywood, which has grave reservations about women directors, was a grueling process. Streisand's property ricocheted from Orion Pictures financial cold feet to PolyGram Pictures personal fights with studio co-president Peters to United Artists.
The story is a love triangle. Yentl falls in love with her yeshiva study partner, played by Mandy Patinkin, who won a Tony for his portrayal of Che Guevara in Evita. He in turn loves Hadass, a girl well schooled in the arts of service and self-abnegation, played by Amy Irving, star of The Competition and Honeysuckle Rose.
Hadass's family forbids her to marry Avigdor, so, looking for a way to remain close to her, he persuades his buddy Yentl to marry her in his stead. This Yentl does, though she manages to avoid sexual contact with her new wife in order to preserve the secret of her gender. Streisand spends most of the movie covered from head to toe in a boy's black suit, her hair caught up under a short brown wig, her eyes hidden behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, her eyebrows untweezed, her breasts compressed to preadolescent flatness by a special bra, and her celebrated nails lopped to the quick.
So many times male directors just want you to get on with it, you know, enough powdering of the nose. She'd fix my hair ribbons, brush an eyelash off my cheek, paint my lips to match the color of the fruit on the table. I was like her little doll that she could dress up. For the scenes where I had to laugh, she'd stand behind the camera pulling the strings of an imaginary Hadass doll, making it burp and cry until I'd completely crack up. Neither Irving nor Patinkin had any difficulty relating to Streisand as a male.
Says Patinkin, "She was a guy. I never thought of her as a girl. I was pretty excited, I mean, I'm the first female to have a screen kiss with Barbra Streisand! She refused to rehearse, but after the first take she said, 'It's not so bad, it's like kissing an arm. Now, sitting in the white study whose noncolor scheme was planned to be "distraction-free, just like Yentl's costume," Streisand tells me that while everyone around her was treating her like a man, she felt more and more like a woman.
But the stronger I felt, the softer I would speak. People would say, 'God, can't you talk any louder? As a small child, she used to enjoy smearing her mother's lip-stick all over her face. One day, she decided to try her grandfather's razor instead and was rushed to the hospital after she nearly cut off her lip.
In Yentl , the face that was preserved in that Brooklyn emergency room blends in well with the androgynous features of the other yeshiva students. I cast boys with big lips and pretty eyes. I also used some girls as boys, did you notice that? Some of them had kind of masculine faces, maybe a little peach fuzz on the upper lip, and they looked good in boys' clothing. I didn't want anybody to be percent masculine or percent feminine.
We adjourn for lunch to a percent feminine room, a conservatory with pink walls and a pink-cloaked table set with Minton china and tiny porcelain flowers at each place.
I once wrote a scene where Avigdor and I are discussing friendship and wondering whether we might be soul mates. A man and a woman can share the same soul, you know. In Singer's short story, where the love triangle has strong homosexual overtones, Yentl finds a way to deflower the virginal Hadass on their wedding night.
So you know what Yentl did. But movies are too real, too literal. That would have been farcical. Even without it, the scene is erotic. I mean the taboos make it sexy, you know? The fear of homosexuality can be very sexy. The fear of men and women touching before marriage can be very sexy. Today we've kind of destroyed that mystery. During the course of the next week, I spend a lot of time staring at Barbra Streisand. Hers is a face so uniquely constructed, so exquisitely surprising in its curves and planes, that one can look at it for hours—years, says Jon Peters—and never get bored.
I tell her that when she was 20, critic John Simon wrote presciently that she was a cross between a tremulous young borzoi and a fatigued Talmudic scholar. You're kidding! I hadn't even read 'Yentl' yet!
One day, when Streisand is sprawled on the carpet of her green and pink living room, I remark that I've heard she prefers to be photographed from the left. I ask if I can look. Thinking to myself that if I were a man I could never get away with this, I circumambulate America's biggest star and study, from every angle, the portion of her anatomy Time has called a shrine.
To my untrained eye, the shrine looks equally well designed from all sides. My left side is more feminine. My right side is more masculine. In the movie I had myself photographed from the right to show a side of me that had hardly ever been seen.
You know the scene after my father's funeral, where I look in a mirror and cut off my hair? I had a crack made in that mirror that would divide my face in half. Male and female. In Isaac Bashevis Singer's story, Yentl's father, a scholar, dies before the narrative begins.
Groban, Josh. For Good. Watch What Happens. Newsies The Musical. A Star Is Born []. Bohemian Rhapsody. Maybe This Time.
When He Sees Me. Waitress: The Musical. Moon River. Breakfast at Tiffany's. My Favorite Things. The Sound of Music. Winehouse, Amy. Your Song. John, Elton. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Barbra Streisand. Rated 4. Spoken God, our merciful Father, I'm wrapped in a robe of light, clothed in your glory that spreads its wings over my soul.
Alfred Publishing Co. Send in the Clowns Barbra Streisand. View All. And tell me where, where is it written what it is I'm meant to be, that I can't dare- To find the meanings in the mornings that I see, Or have my share of every sweet-imagined possibility? Just tell me where- where is it written? Tell me where- Or if it's written anywhere? Tags on Where Is It Written?
Popularity Where Is It Written? Review this song:. Reviews Where Is It Written? No reviews yet! Be the first to make a contribution! Still haven't found what you're looking for?
0コメント