But, hey, if another hit were all she wanted, I'd have no problem; what leaves me reeling is a vocal style that seems to aim at nothing less than world domination. The Broadway Album was, by comparison, an innocent romp in Streisand's old theatrical playground, the work of a supreme singer-actress still unspoiled enough to fall in love with the characters she sings. But this time Streisand turns the star power up so high that she's the only character in sight. She was always commanding; now she reaches heights of self-involvement that, maybe luckily, no other singer may have ever attained.
For an almost supernatural example, listen while in close harmony with Michael Crawford she softly intones "Hard as lightning, soft as candlelight," a corny line from "The Music of' the Night" (the big tune from Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, which Crawford starred in). She vaults off a pause after "soft," making the tiny word "as" such a deft and breathlessly precise advertisement for herself that you forget Crawford is even alive. (Poor lightweight Johnny Mathis, who rashly joins Streisand in the West Side Story selections, is even more thoroughly eclipsed; you can't focus on him even when he's singing solo.)

If she can blow a partner in song away with one single syllable, imagine how she roars down the vocal highway alone. At the end of a song, just for instance, she'll belt out a high note, then crack an unexpected final consonant like a whip, just in case you'd stopped paying attention. As she starts "I've Never Been in Love Before" (a classic Guys and Dolls duet, which she sings alone) she finds a tone of such riveting purity that time all but stops. Later in the song she tops even that when she sings "So please forgive this helpless haze I'm in," and turns each syllable into a priceless jewel, mounted in its own distinct, glowing universe.
With power like that, Streisand steamrolls even her orchestra, which has a climax all to itself in "The Music of' the Night" until she starts scatting along. Unlike, say, the great Billie Holiday, who dissolved herself in her music, letting her pain and passion illumine each song from within, Streisand never lets you forget that she's the one who's singing.
Her headiest fans won't care, of course, because she's giving them exactly what they want: more Barbra per cubic second than they've ever heard before. They probably won't even mind when her jazz improvisations take songs like "Some Enchanted Evening" pretty far from their Broadway roots. But me, I'll take The Broadway Album, which was recorded when the lady stood just a few steps further away from the center of Hollywood and Washington power and, maybe because of that, was alive with generous drama and comparative simplicity. C+

Entertainment Weekly, Summer Double Issue, 1993. The magazine puts grades on all its reviews.