Awake and Sing

Though the show world has so far found room for only one Barbra Streisand--fortunately--a whole chorus of little girls from Brooklyn and neighboring boroughs have tried to stake out their own corner of the action and of the change. While most of them, including Streisand's half sister, Roslyn Kind, have got lost en route, three are belting along toward the top. The trio of neo-Streisands:

> Karen Wyman (nee Weinman), 17, though barely tall enough to clear a slot machine, played the main room of Las Vegas' Sands the night her class graduated from high school. A demonstration record the year before had won her an appearance on NBC's Dean Martin Show. "From hearing your record," the star told her, "I expected some tall, zoftic girl. Are you a midget?" The 5-ft. 1-in. Karen, having steeled herself to be blase over meeting "this 52-year-old man," found that "he was gorgeous, and I broke out in hives." Karen's voice resembles that of Eydie Gorme; she sings with a wobbly tremolo for effect, but her delivery can be lovely when she forgets to belt. Since Martin, and in addition to Vegas, she has played three Tonight shows, Ed Sullivan four times (one will be rerun July 26) and signed a $250,000 record contract with Decca. In accepted success-story fashion, she has moved her father, a TV repairman, and her mother, who worked as a hospital clerk to pay for her singing lessons, from their Bronx walk-up apartment to Manhattan's expensive Upper East Side.

> Julie Budd (nee Erdman), 16, is a Brooklyn-born toy Streisand, (5 ft. 2 1/2 in.). She has yet to learn to read music and insists that she has never studied voice. Says Julie: "I just open my mouth and sing." Within the three years since she was discovered on an amateur night at a resort in the Catskills, she has appeared on most of the network variety shows, including Merve Griffin for the 34th time last week, and has played Caesars Palace in Vegas with Frank Sinatra. She has a big three-octave range and reaches high C with ease in Johnny One Note. Like Karen, Julie belongs chronologically to the Woodstock Nation, but her spirit lies in Tin Pan Alley. Their repertory is mostly golden oldies, and so is their following. "Adults dig me better than kids," says Julie, though she adds: "My parents are not ready for me." Her father, vice president of a bottling company, is not awed by her $80,000-plus income, she says, and her mother would be just as happy if "I married a nice pediatrician."

> Alice Playten (nee Plotkin), 22, has emerged as one of Broadway's most felicitous singing actresses. She is best known for her role as the young bride who cooks the tumescent dumpling and muses about marshmallowed meatballs in a much remarked Alka-Seltzer commercial. She grew up--or at least to 4 ft. 10 1/2 in.--in Brooklyn's Flatbush and in Queens. Dance classes at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School led, at the age of eleven, to a singing role in Wozzeck, a solo curtain call and a New York Times review commending the "crushing irony and pathos" of her performance. At twelve, she was on Broadway in Gypsy. Then followed Oliver!,

Hello, Dolly!, and in Henry, Sweet Henry the show-stopping Nobody Steps on Kafritz number and a Tony nomination. "I wanted to be more than a belter," says Alice, though she was an overpowering one. But she has never been particularly pushy or pushed. "I wasn't fulfilling my parents' frustrations," she says of her optician father and housewife mother. "They aren't stage parents." Her TV and radio commercials (she has done 45 in the last 16 months) bring in enough money so that she can take college courses and wait for roles "with a little meat and a little thought." She is especially fond of her current one, the lead in off-Broadway's charming The Last Sweet Days of Isaac.

Alice will be happy to continue what she is doing. TV casting directors seem seized by an insatiable demand for what she calls "funny-looking little people," and she has become one of the brightest and most engaging regular guests on the Dick Cavett Show. Karen and Julie, who are shallower performers with more grandiose ambitions, may face problems. Both have graduated from just singing on the talk shows to staying on to chat with the host. But neither seems to have much to say.

Both hope that they are headed for the movies. Julie has started and quit three acting schools ("With all these weird people and the dirty language, I am getting a headache!"). Karen is studying with Speech Coach Dorothy Sarnoff to get rid of her accent. "I'm nadda girl from The Bronx anymore," she says. While their futures promise neither the disasters nor the distinction of a Garland or Piaf, Wyman and Budd are mostly fighting the comparison with Streisand. Of course, as Julie says, "that's better than being compared with, say, Sadie Glick."

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