Peter Daniels remembered the same large expanse between the stage and the audience. “We changed the program for the second half,” he said. “We opened with ‘People.’ We had to get it in there fast. She walked off the stage — all the way down — right into the center of the field, onto the wet grass. She was stringing the microphone cord behind her. She had been warned she could have been electrocuted on the wet grass, but she did it anyway. She had to win back the crowd. And she did. They jumped to their feet after that number.”
The L.A. Times
noted, “In the middle of singing ‘Bewitched,’ when a helicopter put-putted overhead, she changed the lyrics to ‘bewitched and really bewildered.’”
Variety
reported the one-night gig grossed $75,417, with ticket prices ranging from $1.95 to $5.95.
The New York Times
review of Streisand's Forest Hills concert by John Wilson was glowing:
BARBRA STREISAND took her night off from “Funny Girl,” in which she has been singing to packed houses since it opened in March, to sing to a sell-out audience of 15,000 at the Forest Hills Stadium yesterday. The skies were overcast and winds were swirling through the stadium when Miss Streisand mounted the uncovered stage. She was wearing a filmy creation in purple, blue and green, which blew blithely in the breeze and which she referred to as “this nightgown.”
But the threatening weather and the awesome dimensions of the stadium all seemed to disappear when she began to sing. She might have been in one of the small nightclubs where she got her start—the Bon Soir or the Blue Angel.
For Miss Streisand communicates. She communicates across yards and yards of beautifully manicured grass tennis courts and up through row on endless row of concrete seats.
[...] Much of Miss Streisand’s charm lies in her sense of the ridiculous, which enables her to transcend the mechanical difficulties that inevitably crop up when a person attempts to treat an audience of 15,000 as though it were just a handful in a dark little club. She wrestled with her microphone, climbed in and out of its wires, tried to avoid falling off the stage with an inventive humor that added immeasurably to her performance.
And when she sang, she was—barring one obstinate note that collapsed in her throat—perfection. Miss Streisand can apparently sing anything—the big, belting song, the subtle, underplayed song, the inadvertently or advertently funny song—and sing each song with such a fine sense of individuality that the performance seems definitive.
