Streisand Closes Two-Night Sunrise Run

Barbra Streisand returned to the BankAtlantic Center stage Sunday night for the second and final performance of her Sunrise engagement, closing one of the highest-profile concert weekends Broward County has seen this year. The show again paired Streisand with conductor Marvin Hamlisch and a full orchestra, and again featured the operatic-pop quartet Il Divo as the opening act and a guest collaborator on a duet later in the program.

The Sunday set list tracked closely with Saturday's, anchored by the Streisand standards a Broward audience would have arrived expecting — "People," "The Way We Were," "Don't Rain on My Parade," "Evergreen" — alongside selections drawn from her recent studio albums and a handful of theatrical numbers built around an oversized video screen behind the orchestra. Hamlisch took the microphone twice during the evening, once to introduce a Hollywood medley and once for an unscripted exchange with Streisand that drew the night's biggest laugh.

A two-night run at this scale is a rarity for the Sunrise arena. Most touring acts at BankAtlantic Center play a single date and move on to AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami the next night. Streisand's decision to anchor in Broward for both South Florida shows kept Sawgrass Expressway traffic backed up well past 7 p.m. on consecutive evenings and gave hotels around Sawgrass Mills a midweek-style occupancy bump on a Saturday and Sunday in late October.

The tour, which opened October 4 in Philadelphia, is scheduled to continue through the fall before wrapping in November. For Sunrise, Sunday night was the closing curtain on an engagement that the city had used in marketing material for weeks. For the rest of Broward, the run was a reminder that the arena that opened as the Panthers' home eight years ago has, by 2006, settled fully into its second identity as a venue capable of holding two nights of an A-list legacy act in a row.

Fans began emptying out toward the parking deck shortly after the second encore. Florida Panthers banners hung from the rafters above an arena floor that had been laid with chairs for two nights of orchestra-and-vocalist programming and would, by midweek, be re-laid with ice for the next home game.