For nearly the entirety of the “Wicked: One Wonderful Night” TV special, which aired on NBC Wednesday night, the performances were focused on Stephen Schwartz’s songs from the two “Wicked” movies. But for the two-hour show’s climax, stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo veered deliciously off-topic to cover a medley of songs first made famous 62 years ago by Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland.
Some younger viewers may have been initially puzzled by the mashup, but fans of a certain age, or of a certain show-tune leaning, got it from the very first bar, or might have even dared to anticipate it when Erivo and Grande sat down on stools, side by side. It was the pairing of two distinct standards that both date back nearly a hundred years, “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” The two classics have come to be conjoined in some people’s minds, but that is only because they were first sung that way by Garland and Streisand on a legendary episode of “The Judy Garland Show” in 1963.
The Judy/Barbra performance became the stuff of legend partly because it captured two legends at opposite ends of their careers. Streisand, then 21, was not only far from a superstar but hadn’t even done “Funny Girl” on Broadway yet — although she had earlier that year released her debut LP, “The Streisand Album,” which had as its Side 2 leadoff number “Happy Days Are Here Again.” That 1929 tune (written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) has remained a staple of her concerts (minus duets or interpolations) right up through her last tour in 2019.
Garland was also singing a signature song for her half of the entwined duet — which was reportedly her idea, to jazz up the special. “Get Happy,” originally penned in 1930 (by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler), was a pseudo-gospel number she popularized in the 1950 MGM musical “Summer Stock” and continued to sing through the end of her life. Then 41, Garland was considered on the professional decline and was six years away from the end of her life when she personally brought in the nascent upstart for several numbers on the Oct. 6, 1963 episode of her weekly variety show.
This particular mashup hardly counts as culturally ubiquitous in 2025. But Grande and Erivo are far from the first to revive it in the modern era, as the medley continues to have cachet among musical theater actors looking for an impressive way to pair up.
Erivo herself has had some practice at it: She previously did it in tandem with Ben Platt one night during his London concert run in 2024. Scroll down to see video of the Erivo/Platt duet, along with other covers. (There’s no apparent record of Grande having sung it with anyone before; she has sung with Streisand both live and on record, but they missed an opportunity in not attempting the tune together.)
If the doubled-up cover feels somewhat familiar to a somewhat younger generation, it may be because it did get significant exposure through an episode of “Glee” from that show’s second season in 2011, as Lea Michele and Chris Coffer teamed up side by side — with Michele’s costuming obviously designed to resemble Streisand’s from 1963.
Other duets that can be seen or heard in clips below include Rufus Wainwright with Kristin Chenoweth; Billy Porter with Cyndi Lauper; Audra McDonald with Patti LuPone — on repeated occasions over the years! (we know, we know); and, going back to 1964, Garland with her daughter, Liza Minnelli.
In the fall of 1963, Garland was determined to have Streisand on her show after catching her at the the Cocoanut Grove in the summer. Norman Jewison, later to be a famous feature helmer, was the director of the Streisand episode (which also featured Ethel Merman and the Smothers Brothers). Mel Tormé was employed to work on special musical material for the series, and he offered backstory for the duet in his book “The Other Side of the Rainbow; With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol.” There, he wrote that Garland summoned him to her dressing room and suggested an inspired idea for the show, playing Streisand’s LP version of “Happy Days Are Here Again” while singing a counter-melody of “Get Happy.”
Wrote Tormé: “The result was electrifying, one of those chance discoveries in which two great songs jell into one extraspecial opus.”
That and the other performances by Streisand mightily impressed CBS executives, regardless of whether the guest was yet a major star at the time. They bumped the episode up ahead of some others that had already been filmed, and it aired just two days after it was recorded, on Oct. 6, 1963.
A half-century or more later, it continued to impress. Profiling Streisand for the New York Times in 2016, the paper’s theater critic, Ben Brantley, wrote: “Each interpreted an upbeat song with a big, trumpeting voice that nonetheless hinted at a small, solitary figure within. Happiness, as hymned in these renditions, would never be won easily. You can find that video on YouTube, and it is impossible to watch it without shivering.”
Talking with Brantley, Streisand said of Garland, “Afterward, she used to visit me and give me advice. She came to my apartment in New York, and she said to me, ‘Don’t let them do to you what they did to me.’ I didn’t know what she meant then. I was just getting started.”
In a 2005 interview with Diane Sawyer, Streisand said that Garland “was great. She was wonderful. Loved her … I was very secure then. I was only 21, I think. I wasn’t afraid of failure or anything. But it was interesting to see someone who was so great and so famous and so gifted … She was drinking Liebfraumilch — you know, a white wine — and her hands were shaking and she was holding onto me. I thought, what was this about? As one grows older, what is this fear? And I understand it now.”
Streisand received her first Emmy nomination for the episode, in the category of Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program.
Few contemporary singers would have the nerve to recreate a moment so very tagged to two of the greatest of the 20th century (or in Streisand’s case, 20th going on 21st), but few enjoy the good will, on top of the chops, that Erivo and Grande have going into the second and final part of the filmic “Wicked” franchise. If it turns out to be happy days for them at the Oscars, their ability to nail a tricky duet classic might have contributed just a little, if clips of the performance become as widely circulated as expected.
Meanwhile, let’s hear it for the audience that saw the taping at the Dolby Theatre Sept. 24 and somehow managed to keep the climax under wraps even on social media until now. EIther that, or they were too young to recognize its significance… Nah, let’s go with discretion.
Here are a few of the other versions rendered from over the years, including another of the many, many times LuPone and McDonald did it over a period of at least a decade and a half, long before the former called the latter “not a friend” earlier this year. Perhaps this revival of the medley will inspire them to hold space for one another yet again.
