The fight began with a clause in a contract. On November 4, 1985, Barbra Streisand, the singer who had spent more than a decade chasing pop hits, released an entire album of classic Broadway show tunes, after her label told her it was not pop music.
A career turns back to Broadway
The Broadway Album, her twenty-fourth studio release, arrived on Columbia Records that day, when Streisand finally brought Broadway back to the center of her work. It was a sharp turn in a career that had gone from musicals and standards in the 1960s to rock, pop, folk and disco from the 1971 album Stoney End through 1984's Emotion. Now she wanted to go back to the stage.
Columbia objected to the Broadway repertoire. Streisand pointed to her contract, which gave her full creative control in exchange for a smaller fee. She said she had the right to sing what she wanted to sing. The label had no way to stop her. The sessions stretched across the spring and summer of 1985, moving through a string of Los Angeles studios: A&M, Evergreen, Lighthouse, Randy Waldman, Village Recorder and Westlake. Streisand was not simply making another record; she was rebuilding the sound of a Broadway evening, take after take. Sondheim also reworked the words for 'Send in the Clowns' for the project. The original vinyl and cassette carried eleven tracks, while the CD edition added a bonus: 'Adelaide's Lament'.
Sondheim rewrites for Streisand
She did not just revive old songs. Stephen Sondheim personally wrote new lyrics for 'Putting It Together' at her request, reshaping the song from Sunday in the Park with George into a commentary on the conflict between art and commerce in the music industry. For the parts of studio bosses in the track, she brought in the director Sydney Pollack and the head of Geffen Records, David Geffen.
Streisand wanted the whole program recorded live to capture the atmosphere of a Broadway performance. Before the sessions, she spent a month in rehearsal with Sondheim. The cover photograph, taken by Richard Corman at the Plymouth Theatre in New York that summer, shows her sitting on stage in a chair surrounded by sheet music. The original vinyl and cassette carried eleven tracks, while the CD edition added a bonus: 'Adelaide's Lament'. Many of the musicians had played in Funny Girl twenty-two years earlier, so the sessions doubled as a reunion of players who knew Streisand's theatrical instincts from the inside.
Singles, shows and Stevie Wonder
The lead single was 'Putting It Together'. The album drew from musicals including Carousel, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, Company, The King and I, Guys and Dolls, A Little Night Music, Show Boat, Porgy and Bess and Chess. The album also had a television companion, 'Putting It Together: The Making of the Broadway Album', which documented the work behind the record. Stevie Wonder appeared on the project as well, playing harmonica on 'Can't Help Lovin' That Man'.
The gamble worked. In 1986 The Broadway Album topped the Billboard 200, and Streisand won a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The New York Times critic Stephen Holden called the record 'possibly the album of a lifetime'. The recognition kept growing. The album was nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys, and David Foster won a Grammy for his arrangement of 'Somewhere'. By January 1995 the record had reached four-times platinum status in the United States, with worldwide sales of 7.5 million copies. In 1993 Entertainment Weekly called the record 'the work of a great singer-actress' and later placed it at number 37 on its list of the 100 greatest CDs.
Forty-one years later, the album stands as the moment Streisand stopped chasing the charts and reclaimed the music she had started with. She had the contract, the rehearsal, the collaborators and the will. She used all of it.