On the night of 9 September 1960, an 18-year-old Barbra Streisand made her way through Greenwich Village to a tiny club called the Bon Soir to perform the first paid solo show of her career. “I remember walking to the club wearing an antique vest from the thrift shop and antique shoes from the 1920s that I still have in my closet today,” she recalled to the Guardian earlier this month. “On the way, I remember thinking, ‘this could be the beginning of a big change in my life.’”
That’s a mammoth understatement. The impact of Streisand’s performances at the Bon Soir – starting that night and continuing for the next two years – set in motion what would become one of the most successful, sustained, and in a sense, improbable careers in the history of popular music.
