Barbra Streisand: The Broadway Album : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Barbra Streisand is all mixed up. "Nobody's into this kind of material," a male voice warns her at the outset of The Broadway Album, on which she sings show stoppers from Company, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Porgy and Bess, Showboat, A Little Night Music, The King and I, Carousel and Sunday in the Park with George. "This is like your old stuff," adds another authoritative male voice. "We gotta appeal to the kids."

But Streisand is determined to let nobody rain on her parade. That the songs on The Broadway Album resemble those that initially won her a following twenty years ago is precisely the point as far as she's concerned. Broadway is where the singer comes from, where her strongest emotional ties are. Still, she tries to have it both ways, and The Broadway Album is weaker for her vacillation. She may be wearing secondhand clothes on the cover, but her production philosophy (she was assisted by Peter Matz, Richard Baskin, David Foster, Bob Esty and Paul Jabara) is tritely up-to-date, with synthesizers, computerized drumming, wailing saxes, even the requisite cameo by a fellow superstar (Stevie Wonder essays a wheezing harmonica obbligato on "Can't Help Lovin' That Man"). There is a level of irony here that Streisand surely did not intend. The aim of the typical Broadway cast album is to make you forget you're listening to a record, to give you the illusion of being there. By contrast, Streisand is so much the self-conscious modern recording artist that she identifies with Georges Seurat, the painter hero of Sunday in the Park with George. "The art of making art is putting it together, bit by bit/Link by link, making the connections," she sings self-reflexively, overlooking the fact that the difference between the pointillists and contemporary record producers is that the former generally knew when to stop.

Yet The Broadway Album works somehow, if only as a reminder of what a neglected wealth of riches Broadway offers and what a marvelous singer Streisand is when she's not trying to pass herself off as a rock star. The program is heavy on Stephen Sondheim, about whom the joke has always been that you leave his shows humming the chord changes. Streisand proves that Sondheim's dense melodies carry outside their dramatic context, although she manages to trivialize the beatific "Pretty Women" (less a celebration of female pulchritude than a paean to the ecstasy of revenge in Sweeney Todd) by yoking it with the dishy "The Ladies Who Lunch" from Company. Her "Send in the Clowns" is bravura, and "Something's Coming" and "Somewhere," the two songs from Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, take wing despite the studio mishegas that weighs them down. Best of all, "Not While I'm Around," an apprehensive lullaby from Sweeney Todd, rescues a gorgeous song from obscurity, while underscoring Streisand's amplitude and sensitivity, her ability to belt and croon simultaneously. It's an inspired interpretation, and Columbia should think about issuing it as a single if "Somewhere," the first single from the album, fails to make the charts.