Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo ‘Get Happy’ Medley greets Barbra and Judy

For almost the entirety of the TV special “Wicked: One Wonderful Night,” which aired Wednesday night on NBC, the performances focused on Stephen Schwartz’s songs from the two “Wicked” films. But for the climax of the two-hour show, stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo delightfully veered off topic and covered a medley of songs first made famous 62 years ago by Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland.

Some younger viewers may have been surprised by the mashup at first, but fans of a certain age, or of a certain show tune, got it from the very first bar, or perhaps even anticipated it when Erivo and Grande sat down next to each other on stools. It was the combination of two different standards that are both almost a hundred years old: ‘Get Happy’ and ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’. The two classics are linked in some people’s minds, but that’s 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 legendary, in part because it captured two legends on opposite sides of their careers. Streisand, then 21, was not only far from a superstar, but had not yet even performed “Friendly Girl” on Broadway — although earlier that year she had released her debut LP, “The Streisand Album,” with Side 2’s opening track, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” That 1929 song (written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) has remained a staple of her concerts (without duets or interpolations) until her last tour in 2019.

Garland also performed a signature song for her half of the intertwined duet – which was reportedly her idea, to liven up the special. Originally written in 1930 (by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler), “Get Happy” was a pseudo-gospel song that she popularized in the 1950 MGM musical “Summer Stock” and continued to sing until the end of her life. At 41, Garland was considered in professional decline and six years away from the end of her life when she personally brought in the rising upstart for several songs on the October 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 this mix in the modern era, as the medley still has cachet among musical theater actors looking for an impactful way to collaborate.

Erivo has had some practice at it herself: she previously did it with Ben Platt one night at his London concert in 2024. Scroll down to see the video of the Erivo/Platt duet, along with other covers. (There’s no clear evidence that Grande has sung it with anyone before; she has sung with Streisand both live and on record, but they missed an opportunity by not trying the tune together.)

If the double cover feels somewhat known to A somewhat of the younger generation, perhaps because it gained significant notoriety from an episode of “Glee” from that show’s second season in 2011, when Lea Michele and Chris Coffer worked side-by-side — with Michele’s costumes clearly designed to resemble Streisand’s from 1963.

Other duets seen or heard in the clips below include Rufus Wainwright with Kristin Chenoweth; Billy Porter with Cyndi Lauper; Audra McDonald with Patti LuPone – repeatedly 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 in Cocoanut Grove during the summer. Norman Jewison, who would later become a famous feature film helmer, was the director of the Streisand episode (which also featured Ethel Merman and the Smothers Brothers). Mel Tormé was hired to work on special musical material for the series, and he provided a 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 called him into her dressing room and proposed an inspired idea for the show, playing Streisand’s LP version of “Happy Days Are Here Again” while singing a countermelody to “Get Happy.”

Tormé wrote: “The result was exciting, one of those serendipitous discoveries where two great songs come together in one extra special opus.”

That and Streisand’s other performances made a big impression on CBS executives, regardless of whether the guest was still a big star at the time. They gave the episode an edge over some others that had already been filmed, and it aired just two days after it was shot, on October 6, 1963.

Half a century or more later it continued to impress. The paper’s theater critic Ben Brantley, writing about Streisand for the New York Times in 2016, wrote, “Everyone performed a cheerful song with a big, trumpeting voice that nevertheless alluded to a small, lonely figure within themselves. Happiness, as hymned in these renditions, was never going to be easily won. You can find that video on YouTube, and it’s impossible to watch it without wincing.”

Speaking to Brantley, Streisand said of Garland: “Afterwards she visited me and gave me advice. She came to my apartment in New York and said to me, ‘Don’t let them do to you what they did to me.’ I didn’t know what she meant at the time. I was just getting started.”

In a 2005 interview with Diane Sawyer, Streisand said that Garland “was wonderful. She was wonderful. I loved her… I felt very safe then. I was only 21, I think. I wasn’t afraid of failure or anything. But it was interesting to see someone so big and so famous and so gifted… She was drinking Liebfraumilch – you know, a white wine – and her hands were shaking and she was holding me. I thought, where was this going? 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 Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program category.

Few contemporary singers would have the guts to recreate a moment so closely associated with two of the greatest of the 20th century (or in Streisand’s case the 20th and the 21st), but few enjoy the good will, in addition to the chops, that Erivo and Grande have entering the second and final installment of the cinematic ‘Wicked’ franchise. If these turn out to be happy days for them at the Oscars, their ability to pull off a tricky duet classic might have only helped a little, if snippets of the performance became as widely distributed as expected.

In the meantime, let’s hear it for the audiences who saw the taping at the Dolby Theater on September 24 and somehow managed to keep the climax hidden until now, even on social media. Either that, or they were too young to see its significance… No, let’s do it with discretion.

Here are a few of the other versions that have appeared over the years, including another of the many, many times LuPone and McDonald have done 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 make space for each other again.