‘I love Barbra Streisand. You love Barbra Streisand. So enjoy!’

You could certainly call Liza Pulman a funny girl. As one-third of the hilariously comedic singing group Fascinating Aida, which boasts three Olivier Award nominations for Best Entertainment and has recently celebrated its 40^th anniversary, she has wowed audiences with her versatility, vocal agility and sheer salacity. The Financial Times hailed them as “one of the most exquisitely polished shows you are ever likely to see”. And yet this demure blonde has several other strings to her bow, one of which is her abiding love of one artist in particular, Barbra Streisand.

To this end, Liza eschews the bawdiness of the girl group, exuding instead an air of elegant sophistication as befits someone who studied singing at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama and who, in 1994, performed at Glyndebourne Opera in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This production was conducted by no-less-a-maestro than Sir Georg Solti, who in 1938 had fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws of his homeland and whose very first conducting opportunity in his career happened to be, by pure coincidence, the very same Marriage of Figaro.

Barbra Streisand herself is no stranger to the classical repertoire, rendering Debussy, Faure and Schumann with exquisite panache in her album Classical Barbra and having also been described as the only person who can turn Cry Me a River into something comparable to the opera singer Caruso “having his bash at Pagliacci.”

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Born in 1969 in Westminster, Pulman is the daughter of screenwriter Jack Pulman (most famous for the BBC television series I, Claudius) and actress Barbara Young (who has appeared in Coronation Street and, amazingly, has an older sister named Cory). Jack was Jewish with Polish antecedents, his father Arthur coming over to Britain as a young man with his brother and together setting up a chain of barber shops in London’s East End. Liza tells me that, while she was growing up, her mother ensured that the family was drowned in chicken soup and chopped liver.

Liza was weaned on the music of the Great American Songbook, which explains her great affinity with Frank Sinatra, Billie Holliday and the songs of Hollywood’s movie-musicals. Her Hooray For Hollywood show sees her, together with the singer/pianist Joe Stilgoe, perform the great songs from the big screen. We’re talking Doe a Deer, A Spoonful of Sugar, some Fred Astaire, some Fiddler on the Roof and everything in between, so grab your popcorn and prepare to be swept away by the magic of West Side Story, The Wizard of Oz, Wicked and La La Land.

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It’s a long way from Westminster to Barbra’s birthplace in Brooklyn, but the miles dissolve when you watch Liza singing Barbra, head tilted and arms expressively caressing the lyrics, whether gliding effortlessly above the orchestration in the up-tempo numbers, or leaning into the melody with rapt eloquence when doing cosy and intimate. Liza’s take on A Sleepin’ Bee, an early personal favourite of Barbra, written by Harold Arlen of Over The Rainbow fame, performed with just guitar accompaniment, bears all the wide-eyed youthful innocence that in 1964 propelled Barbra to stardom, scooping the part of the Jewish teenager Fanny Brice in the Broadway Production of Funny Girl, which she reprised four years later at the cinema. Liza idiomatically offers us two signature songs from this musical, Don’t Rain on My Parade and People.

In presenting six decades of Barbra Streisand in one evening, Liza has a huge iconic repertoire on which to draw, so she leavens the showstoppers, such as Second Hand Rose, by interspersing them with more elegiac numbers (The Way He Makes Me Feel from the movie Yentl, meltingly gorgeous, and You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, originally released by Barbra as a duet with Neil Diamond). Shaping dynamics to suit tempo and sentiment, she lavishes great care on the melodic refrain and elicits subtle emotion from the words.

Liza stresses that the audience (and her six-piece band, which she assures us “sounds like the London Philharmonic”) is as much a part of the evening as she is. One of Barbra’s greatest attributes is her ability to hold the audience in the palm of her hand as if they’re in her own living room and Liza similarly achieves this with her smooth between-numbers anecdotal patter and her Streisand-like sprinkling of dry humour, weaving a narrative and building an easy rapport with her listeners to enhance the show’s relaxed ambience.

To be sure, Liza is not, nor would in any way claim to be, a Barbra Streisand impersonator. Her brief is simple: “I love Barbra Streisand. You love Barbra Streisand. So enjoy!” Liza views it as a celebration and accordingly distils the true essence of Barbra, generating a warmth and humanity that seeks out the music’s expressive truth, so that you come away from an evening spent in her presence feeling that you’ve been granted the privilege of a personal audience with the diva herself – and at a price that still leaves you on friendly terms with your bank manager.

Liza Sings Streisand is at the Radlett Centre on 22 October and at St Martin’s in the Fields in London on 10 November. Hooray For Hollywood is at Wiltons Music Hall 3 – 7 November.