For almost the whole lot of the “Wicked: One Wonderful Night” TV particular, which aired on NBC Wednesday evening, the performances have been centered on Stephen Schwartz’s songs from the 2 “Depraved” motion pictures. However for the two-hour present’s climax, stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo veered deliciously off-topic to cowl a medley of songs first made well-known 62 years in the past by Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland.
Some youthful viewers could have been initially puzzled by the mashup, however followers of a sure age, or of a sure show-tune leaning, received it from the very first bar, or might need even dared to anticipate it when Erivo and Grande sat down on stools, facet by facet. It was the pairing of two distinct requirements that each date again almost 100 years, “Get Pleased” and “Pleased Days Are Right here Once more.” The 2 classics have come to be conjoined in some folks’s minds, however that’s solely as a result of they have been first sung that manner by Garland and Streisand on a legendary episode of “The Judy Garland Present” in 1963.
The Judy/Barbra efficiency turned the stuff of legend partly as a result of it captured two legends at reverse ends of their careers. Streisand, then 21, was not solely removed from a famous person however hadn’t even finished “Humorous Lady” on Broadway but — though she had earlier that 12 months launched her debut LP, “The Streisand Album,” which had as its Facet 2 leadoff quantity “Pleased Days Are Right here Once more.” That 1929 tune (written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) has remained a staple of her live shows (minus duets or interpolations) proper up by means of her final tour in 2019.
Garland was additionally singing a signature tune for her half of the entwined duet — which was reportedly her concept, to jazz up the particular. “Get Pleased,” initially penned in 1930 (by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler), was a pseudo-gospel quantity she popularized within the 1950 MGM musical “Summer season Inventory” and continued to sing by means of the tip of her life. Then 41, Garland was thought-about on the skilled decline and was six years away from the tip of her life when she personally introduced within the nascent upstart for a number of numbers on the Oct. 6, 1963 episode of her weekly selection present.
This specific mashup hardly counts as culturally ubiquitous in 2025. However Grande and Erivo are removed from the primary to revive it within the fashionable period, because the medley continues to have cachet amongst musical theater actors on the lookout for a powerful option to pair up.
Erivo herself has had some apply at it: She beforehand did it in tandem with Ben Platt one evening throughout his London live performance run in 2024. Scroll right down to see video of the Erivo/Platt duet, together with different covers. (There’s no obvious document of Grande having sung it with anybody earlier than; she has sung with Streisand each stay and on document, however they missed a chance in not making an attempt the tune collectively.)
If the doubled-up cowl feels considerably acquainted to a considerably youthful technology, it could be as a result of it did get vital publicity by means of an episode of “Glee” from that present’s second season in 2011, as Lea Michele and Chris Coffer teamed up facet by facet — with Michele’s costuming clearly designed to resemble Streisand’s from 1963.
Different duets that may be seen or heard in clips beneath embrace Rufus Wainwright with Kristin Chenoweth; Billy Porter with Cyndi Lauper; Audra McDonald with Patti LuPone — on repeated events through the years! (we all know, we all know); and, going again to 1964, Garland along with her daughter, Liza Minnelli.
Within the fall of 1963, Garland was decided to have Streisand on her present after catching her on the the Cocoanut Grove in the summertime. Norman Jewison, later to be a well-known characteristic helmer, was the director of the Streisand episode (which additionally featured Ethel Merman and the Smothers Brothers). Mel Tormé was employed to work on particular musical materials for the collection, and he supplied backstory for the duet in his guide “The Different Facet of the Rainbow; With Judy Garland on the Daybreak Patrol.” There, he wrote that Garland summoned him to her dressing room and steered an impressed concept for the present, enjoying Streisand’s LP model of “Pleased Days Are Right here Once more” whereas singing a counter-melody of “Get Pleased.”
Wrote Tormé: “The end result was electrifying, a kind of likelihood discoveries through which two nice songs jell into one extraspecial opus.”
That and the opposite performances by Streisand mightily impressed CBS executives, no matter whether or not the visitor was but a significant star on the time. They bumped the episode up forward of some others that had already been filmed, and it aired simply two days after it was recorded, on Oct. 6, 1963.
A half-century or extra later, it continued to impress. Profiling Streisand for the New York Instances in 2016, the paper’s theater critic, Ben Brantley, wrote: “Every interpreted an upbeat tune with an enormous, trumpeting voice that nonetheless hinted at a small, solitary determine inside. Happiness, as hymned in these renditions, would by no means be received simply. You could find that video on YouTube, and it’s not possible to look at it with out shivering.”
Speaking with Brantley, Streisand mentioned of Garland, “Afterward, she used to go to me and provides me recommendation. She got here to my condo in New York, and he or she mentioned to me, ‘Don’t allow them to do to you what they did to me.’ I didn’t know what she meant then. I used to be simply getting began.”
In a 2005 interview with Diane Sawyer, Streisand mentioned that Garland “was nice. She was great. Cherished her … I used to be very safe then. I used to be solely 21, I feel. I wasn’t afraid of failure or something. Nevertheless it was fascinating to see somebody who was so nice and so well-known and so gifted … She was ingesting Liebfraumilch — you recognize, a white wine — and her arms have been shaking and he or she was holding onto me. I believed, what was this about? As one grows older, what is that this worry? And I perceive it now.”
Streisand obtained her first Emmy nomination for the episode, within the class of Excellent Efficiency in a Selection or Musical Program.
Few up to date singers would have the nerve to recreate a second so very tagged to 2 of the best of the twentieth century (or in Streisand’s case, twentieth happening twenty first), however few benefit from the good will, on prime of the chops, that Erivo and Grande have going into the second and last a part of the filmic “Depraved” franchise. If it seems to be glad days for them on the Oscars, their capacity to nail a difficult duet traditional might need contributed just a bit, if clips of the efficiency develop into as extensively circulated as anticipated.
In the meantime, let’s hear it for the viewers that noticed the taping on the Dolby Theatre Sept. 24 and someway managed to maintain the climax beneath wraps even on social media till now. EIther that, or they have been too younger to acknowledge its significance… Nah, let’s go along with discretion.
Listed here are a couple of of the opposite variations rendered from through the years, together with one other of the various, many occasions LuPone and McDonald did it over a interval of at the least a decade and a half, lengthy earlier than the previous known as the latter “not a buddy” earlier this 12 months. Maybe this revival of the medley will encourage them to carry house for each other but once more.
