'It seems brutal to place a woman in such an exposed position, where a whole Broadway production rests on notes she can’t sustain.' Helen_E_Shaw writes that in the Broadway revival of 'Funny Girl,' Beanie Feldstein’s voice lets her down
Beanie Feldstein in Funny Girl, at the August Wilson. Photo: Matthew Murphy Building an immense show around one person is a gamble. In 1910, the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld rolled the dice with the comic performer Fanny Brice — he invited her to headline his Follies, a recurring series of spectacles constructed around the flawless, interchangeable Ziegfeld girls. In that year, and intermittently for decades after, Brice was the axis for his carousel of glitz.
Now the producers of the Funny Girl revival make their own gamble. In transferring Michael Mayer’s production from London, they’ve constructed their show around the 28-year-old Beanie Feldstein — like Babs in 1964, a Broadway sophomore. Just as Ziegfeld did, they hope one type of talent will translate to another arena, that Feldstein’s precise comic touch in movies like Booksmart and Lady Bird will transform into the necessary Big White Way charisma.
There’s a palpable sense that the rest of the production is running hard to make up the relay. The night I saw it, the overture got excited applause — as the orchestra hit certain recognizable strains, director Michael Mayer bumped the lightbulbs around the proscenium, and the crowd gave little shrieks of delight. It’s not exactly the musical you remember, though.
Whatever Fierstein’s contributions, it’s still a musical written in Brice’s dominating shadow: the original producer Ray Stark was her son-in-law. So if you want to know how she actually elbowed her way up the vaudeville circuit, you’ll need to look elsewhere. The messy truth is far from Lennart’s misty-eyed libretto, which elides the real Fanny’s first marriage and her many trips to Sing Sing, where she visited her mooching, criminal, married beau.
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