It would’ve been a diva dream team with the Queen of Pop and the Queen of Buttah.
That’s what almost happened when Madonna was supposed to pair up with Barbra Streisand on the latter’s 1993 “Back to Broadway” album.
The sequel to Streisand’s 1985 “The Broadway Album” was set to feature Madonna on the classic show tune “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” — from the Irving Berlin musical “Annie Get your Gun” — but there was also another superstar diva in the mix: Bette Midler.
“[Producer] David Foster created a demo and we said, ‘Well, who could we do this with?’” said Jay Landers, Streisand’s A&R man on the project, in an interview posted on the Madonna Songbook Instagram page. “And we chose Madonna and … Bette. So it was gonna be the three of them.”
As envisioned, Landers said the triple throwdown was supposed to end with all three women in the ladies room, with Madonna and Midler bitching about Streisand: “ ‘God, she’s such a bitch! And she’s so controlling. And this and that and the other thing, and blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And then we hear another stall open and, ‘Ladies, I’m in here!’ And that’s how the song was gonna end.”
Landers said that Foster had come up with “this brilliant arrangement which starts off very much like how we all know the song. But then when it came time to do Madonna’s section … he went into a Madonna disco beat. And when it was Bette’s turn … he went into kind of, like, a ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ motif. So it touched upon their sounds. Really clever.”
But Landers had the toughest task of all as the diva wrangler.
“Of course, my job was was to wrangle all this talent,” he said. “And they all agreed.”
But this trio for the ages was not meant to go down in pop history.
“And then Madonna at the 11 1/2 hour couldn’t do it for some reason,” he said. “So that’s one of those ‘fish that got away’ stories.”
It’s not hard to see why it was hard for the Material Girl to get into this groove: Madonna was at the busy peak of both her music and movie careers in the early ’90s, from “Vogue” and the Blond Ambition Tour to “Dick Tracy” and “A League of Their Own.”
But there was one creative connection between Madonna and Streisand that did happen.
In 1992, Madonna appeared on “Saturday Night Live” with host Roseanne Barr on a segment of Mike Myers’ famous “Coffee Talk” sketch. Then after the trio lamented the fact that Streisand — the idol of Myers’ Linda Richman character — failed to get an Oscar nomination for directing 1991’s “The Prince of Tides,” Babs herself made a surprise cameo at the end.
