It may be a great ride, but “Funny Girl” is rarely a great ride. Parade” and other issues. Not only are Bob Merrill’s lyrics often silly (“I shine like a light”?), but the vocal-writing challenge that made Barbra Streisand star in 1964 was to cast someone else. It’s now a nightmare to do.
Let’s start with a book by Isabel Lennart by telling the story of early 20th century comic Fanny Bryce and her disastrous love affair with gambler Nick Arnstein. A warehouse of used musical comedy parts. They don’t work well together, but they do well individually.
Revival opened in April At the August Wilson Theater (a first on Broadway), things got even worse. Harvey Fierstein’s meddling in the confusing book leaves Nick (Ramin Karimloo) with more to do, making the book even more chaotic. No one cares what Nick does. And Fanny, who we care about, was far too accessible for Beanie Feldstein and delivered a comfortable performance in a role that shouldn’t have been. Without Fanny,” I wrote at the time, “the various shortcomings of the musical become painfully obvious.”
Lea Michele, who took over the role on Sept. 6, turned out to be that freaking funny. Vulnerable and invincible, weird and hot-tempered, she’s worth watching the show again.
But she can’t get it better. Michael Mayer’s work remains flashy and intrusive, pandering to audience overreaction. A confetti cannon tries to put an exclamation mark on the dance of duds. Many minor players overplay. The lighting by Kevin Adams gives rat-claps, and the unusually ugly set by David Zinn seems weaponized against intimacy.
But at least “Funny Girl” has missiles. The performer hits the target by shooting straight from the first word (“Hello, Gorgeous”).
Decades of false starts involving the likes of Lauren Ambrose, Debbie Gibson, Sheridan Smith, and others have been a winding road to this apparently correct and seemingly doomed casting. just one in a long list of After she ditched the show in a cloud of apparent distress — a cloud that everyone denied — her standby Julie Benko took over.
Benko, Thursday Night’s Fanny, sings the part so well that you don’t have to worry, like Feldstein, that she might not pull off the song well. Then again, Benko approaches the dark core of the comedy and backfills that plot with something of rage, and yet, while she’s fine, her voice and the rest of her performance still don’t match up. She has a different accent when she plays her part and when she sings.
Michele matches the whole thing. An extraordinary instrument, her voice is a tool, not an ornament, and she knows how to use it. Not surprising in itself. It looks like she’s been trying for the role since her 2009. She sang most of Fanny’s numbers It has a very sophisticated, sometimes Streisand karaoke-like strong vibe. (Rachel’s middle name was Barbra.)
On stage, however, Barbraisms doesn’t stand out much. Streisand essentially rewrote and improved some of Stein’s vocal lines. The song works (and the scene pretty much works) if the performers have access to manic desperation to succeed. Let’s just say that like her idol, Michele has that access.
What surprised me about “Funny Girl” is that she has access to even more information. You don’t need to understand the details of register placement, but performers who can play all “people” without worrying about switching registers have enough bandwidth left to worry about more important things. I understand. When Michele sings this song, it’s not a silly statement, it’s a real quest. Can Fanny succeed in both her love, which means so much to her, and her work, which means so much more?
And finally, when life gives an unhappy answer, Michele doesn’t play with grief. With hot tears, she takes enough time to fully recover and says the finale, “Rain on my parade.” Don’t Let It Rain” moves on to the reprise. As Fanny reaches out to seize the life she wants, it’s her shaping the role that she sings in a very different way than she did at the end of Act 1. Now she’s reaching inward to save herself from an emotional disaster – Michele points out with typical vocal bravado in the song’s final heart-stopping phrase. increase.
Unfortunately you may not hear it. Despite the amplified vocals, the amplified audience is often even louder than Michele. (On Tuesday, one of her few in-show standing ovations was actually in the middle of a song.) You can’t blame her fans for their excitement. At least there’s something worth getting excited about here. You’ll find yourself having to calculate on the fly without worrying about when and how Michele will resume or blow up soon.
In some ways, she’s almost too serious for the show. Either way, comedy isn’t her (or that’s) her best suit. If the title is “Funny Girl”, that’s a problem. Still, she has a good laugh when Michele is given a good situation to play with, like when Nick seduces her at a restaurant.Also, like the embarrassing joke added after Feldstein, she shyly A song sung on roller skates in the 1968 filmshe looks lost even as the audience nods at the cue.
I hope she stays immersed in the role and doesn’t succumb to the general hysteria. and Tova Feldshuh, who replaced the zany Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother, is so gritty and salty that she can turn… ice to slush. In Florentz Ziegfeld’s small role, Peter Francis James remains a model of dignified restraint.
Charismatic performers make what they do disappear. In fact they replace it. Their voice becomes the voice, their skin becomes the story. What makes Michele make “Funny Girl” look better than we know it is the wonderful but perhaps irreproducible of the mutual need between upward old-school talent and downward old-school musical It’s a need like lovers, who know what the song says about them: Despite all the evidence, they’re the luckiest people in the world.
funny girl
At the August Wilson Theater in Manhattan. funnygirlonbroadway.comRunning time: 2 hours 50 minutes.