Pamela Enders Embraces Barbra Streisand with 'The Early Years'

"When I was an adolescent and listening to records, like a lot of young people did in the early '60s, I loved to sing along with my music," recalls cabaret performer Pamela Enders. "My mother, noticing this, told me 'There's this new singer on the Tonight Show tonight. Why don't you stay up and watch her with me?' So, I did, and I had never seen anything like her. Even though she was older than I was, I could still relate to her, and I thought, why don't I do that?" The singer was Barbra Streisand.

Even though Enders went on to get her Ph.D. in Psychology and build a four-decade long career as a psychologist, she still managed to keep singing, first at open mics, then in cabaret venues, and even recording several CDs. In the past decade, Enders has become one of Boston's premier cabaret performers and on Sunday, April 30, at the Club Café's Moonshine Room, Enders will honor one of her earliest inspirations with her cabaret show, "A Love Letter to Barbra: The Early Years," with the Tom LaMark Quartet.

When Streisand first hit the scene in 1960, she was merely 18, having just won a singing contest at The Lion, a Greenwich Village gay nightclub, which garnered her a several-week-long performing gig at that club, followed by six months at the Bon Soir nightclub that same year. The greatly anticipated release of the recordings of her Bon Soir performances was just this past January. Long runs at the Blue Angel brought her even further into the national consciousness, and by the time she was 19, she was appearing in her first Broadway show, "I Can Get It for You Wholesale," where she stopped the show nightly. One theater critic Leonard Harris wrote, "She's twenty; by the time she's thirty she will have rewritten the record books." Johnny Carson had her on the Tonight Show a half dozen times in 1962-63, and one of those times a very young Enders was mesmerized and forever changed.

"I bought [her first recording] 'The Barbra Streisand Album' and would stand in front of the mirror singing into my hairbrush," laughed Enders. "There is that voice: the crystal-clear pitch and the breath control. She could hold those notes forever." But there was even more to it than that. Something that distinguished Streisand from the legions of other singers out there. "She was giving voice to what I was feeling. The angst and yearning that I was feeling as a teenage girl, she was expressing through the songs. But not just the songs, but her rendition of the songs."

Enders subtitles her show "The Early Years," and she believes it's important to distinguish those from the rest of her career. "I bought all of the early albums, and even a few later ones, like 'Stoney End,'" admits Enders. "But I didn't like the later albums. They were overproduced: way too many strings. They were too perfect. On the earlier albums, you could hear the occasional wobble in her voice that for me made it more real."

Enders credits Streisand's then boyfriend, Barry Dennen, with her early success. "It's important to understand the coaching she got from Barry. She desperately wanted to be an actress. She had no desire to sing," explains Enders. Streisand and Dennen met doing a play together that flopped. She was drawn to him for his sophisticated knowledge of music and theater. He had a huge record collection, and an encyclopedic knowledge of musical theater and songs of the Great American Songbook. "They fell in love even though he was either gay or bi," remarks Enders, "Because she wanted to be a dramatic actress, she kept trying to audition for all these plays. And she said to Barry one day, 'This guy wants to hear a tape of me singing. Would you tape me singing?' And Barry was cringing, wondering if she could even sing, and she sang this song for him called 'Day by Day' [not the 'Godspell' song, but an earlier song with the same title] and he was stunned, he could hardly speak. He told her she should become a singer, but she wasn't interested. She told her roommate Marilyn, 'Barry thinks I can sing so would you listen to me because I don't think I can sing. But you have to turn around, because I'm too nervous to have you watch me.' So, she sang 'Sleepin' Bee,' and when the song was finished, Marilyn turned around and she was crying."

When Dennen entered Streisand into that singing contest at The Lion, and suggested she sing "Sleepin' Bee," he showed her that a song could in fact be a three-act play if one plumbs the depths of the emotion in the song. Streisand has credited that experience with her choice to pursue a singing career because she could indeed be acting through her singing. Enders, of course, honors that moment by including "Sleepin' Bee" in her show.

Thanks to Dennen, Enders adds, other gay men helped shape Streisand's early years. "We often think of her eyes, her makeup, and she was taught that by Bob Schulenberg, a friend of Barry's. He was an artist. He developed her look," asserts Enders. "There was another guy, Terry Leong, a costume designer, who dressed her, and took her to thrift stores in New York to help her with her look. She had a lot of help with these three gay men. All these things made her unique. She thought she was ugly. She was seriously thinking about having her nose done, and it was Barry who said, 'Absolutely not. Why would you do that and look like every other pretty girl?' So, he took her to the Metropolitan Museum and showed her Nefertiti, and she said 'Oh, that schnoz,' but it became a signature look for her."

Streisand sang and recorded so much of the Great American Songbook, popular standards, and songs from Broadway musicals, that Enders won't get to them all. "I'll be singing so many of my favorites in the show from those early years." If you're a fan of some of those sweeping romantic Michel Legrand songs that he wrote with Marilyn and Alan Bergman, you may have to wait. "Those came later. They will be in my second Streisand show!" quips Enders.

And speaking of humor, "The other thing I loved about her was her zany humor," adds Enders. "A lot of it was an act. But she made herself accessible. The funny Brooklyn Jewish accent. Her self-deprecating humor made her different from other singers. She connected with the audience and made herself lovable."

Enders contemplates why she finds the early years so compelling, so thrilling, that she had to offer her own homage to this titan of song. "She filled her singing with her own angst and yearning. We could all relate to her. You know I love singers like Nancy Wilson, but Barbra put her whole heart and soul into it. That's why it's a love letter because she was very important to me growing up, like she was to millions of teenage girls and boys."

Pamela Enders performs "A Love Letter to Barbra: The Early Years" on April 30, 2023, 3 PM at The Moonshine Room, Club Café, 209 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA. Tickets $25. For reservations, click here.