A Night of Music to Remember Marvin Hamlisch

September 19, 2012, 8:34 am

By DAVE ITZKOFF

“Maaah-vin,” Barbra Streisand said on Tuesday night, affectionately addressing a portrait of Marvin Hamlisch that was projected on the stage of Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater. “The name itself just makes me smile.”

Before she concluded a star-studded tribute to Mr. Hamlisch, the highly decorated stage and screen composer who died in August, Ms. Streisand explained that, as a Brooklynite, she had a certain license to address him so familiarly.

“Mothers were always hanging out of their windows, calling, ‘Maaah-vin,'” she said.

It was also a privilege Ms. Streisand earned through a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Mr. Hamlisch, beginning on the 1964 Broadway producti on of “Funny Girl,” where he was her rehearsal pianist and the obtainer of her chocolate donuts. Through the years, she said, they found that they shared each other's passions and understood each other's anxieties.

“It's all right, it's a Jewish thing,” Ms. Streisand said. So she prefaced the songs “The Way We Were” and “Through the Eyes of Love,” both with music by Mr. Hamlisch, by saying, “Let's do a Jewish thing.”

At the start of the evening, Mr. Hamlisch's widow, Terre Blair Hamlisch, said that the night's program had been initiated by a phone call she received from Ms. Streisand soon after her husband's death.

“She said, ‘I want to sing for Marvin,'” Mrs. Hamlisch recalled. “‘I want to send Marvin off in a very big way.'”

Sure enough, it was a musical memorial befitting a man who won three Academy Awards (for contributions to “The Way We Were” and “The Sting”), a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize (both for “A Chorus Line”), and numerous other commendations.

The lineup of performers on stage over the night included Liza Minnelli, Aretha Franklin, and Itzhak Perlman and Lang Lang. The audience included luminaries like Valerie Jarrett, the adviser to President Obama; Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones; Regis Philbin; Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer; and Joe Torre, the former manager of Mr. Hamlisch's beloved Yankees.

Ms. Franklin hardly needed the amplification of the theater's audio system to be heard on her performance of “Nobody Does It Better,” and drew applause from the audience before she could finish singing its first syllable.

Ms. Minnelli, who sang a version of “If He Really Knew Me” (“He really knew me, oh my Marvin”) with piano accompaniment by Michael Feinstein, introduced her performance as “a wonderful memory of a splendid, splendid friend.”

Noting that she had known Mr. Hamlisch since she was 14½ and he was 15¾, Ms. Minnelli was almost unwilling to acknowledge that Mr. Hamlisch was really gone. She said she was happy to see that the evening's program had brought together so many of his friends, loved ones and collaborators. “Other than that, I hate it,” she said.

Other numbers from the night included “At the Fountain” performed by Brian d'Arcy James (who originated the song in the Broadway musical adaptation of “Sweet Smell of Success”), and “While I Still Have the Time,” performed by the ensemble of “The Nutty Professor,” a musical that Mr. Hamlisch was working on when he died.

“A Chorus Line” was also well-represented on the program with versions of “Nothing” performed by Maria Friedman; and “At the Ballet” performed by Dena DiGiacinto, Emily Fletcher and Hollie Howard.