At age 72, Cher is confident she’s at the top of her game. “I have unbelievable pipes. My doctor says I’m a freak,” beamed the legendary entertainer, whose new album, Dancing Queen, drops Sept. 28. Even Barbra Streisand is impressed by her chutzpah. 

“I was talking to Barbra one day,” Cher recently revealed to The New York Times. “She asked, ‘Why do you still sing?’ I said, ‘Because there’s going to come a day when I can’t. No one will want to come see me.'” 

That’s hard to believe considering Cher’s knack for reinvention and countless comebacks, which will all be chronicled in The Cher Show premiering on Broadway this December. In the musical, Cher is portrayed by three actresses of differing ages. 

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“It’s a great idea because I’ve lived so long that I really have been distinct personalities,” the singer, who’s co-producing the show, has said of the project. There’s no denying the impact Sonny Bono had on her early years, but Cher — who met her first husband in her mid-teens — says she became a new woman after their 1975 divorce.

“When I left him, I was real happy,” she recalled of finally finding her independence. “But I started to make huge mistakes in front of everyone because I was still 16 inside. I hadn’t grown.” 

Still, there have been plenty of triumphs, too, like her Oscar win for 1987’s Moonstruck and recently being named as a Kennedy Center Honor recipient. It’s perhaps divine intervention that she’ll accept that award on Dec. 2, the night before her musical premieres on Broadway. 

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“Sometimes you’re great, and sometimes you’re pathetic,” Cher admitted of riding the waves of success while learning from her misfires. “I feel like a bumper car,” she previously told Vanity Fair, which her fans have come to love. “If I hit a wall, I’m backing up and going in another direction. And I’ve hit plenty of walls in my career. But I’m not stopping. I think maybe that’s my best quality: I just don’t stop.”

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