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    Review: In Lea Michele, ‘Funny Girl’ Has Finally Found Its Fanny

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    The “Glee” star is stupendous in the role Barbra Streisand made famous, turning the 1964 musical into something better than we know it to be.Though it can be a great vehicle, “Funny Girl” has rarely been a great ride. Even its first-rate Jule Styne songs — “I’m the Greatest Star,” “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” among them — are problematic. Not only are the lyrics, by Bob Merrill, often inane (“I’ll light up like a light”?) but the challenge of the vocal writing that made Barbra Streisand a star in 1964 makes casting anyone else now a nightmare.And let’s not get started on the book, by Isobel Lennart, which in telling the (mostly fictional) story of the early-20th-century comic Fanny Brice, and her disastrous love affair with the gambler Nick Arnstein, seems to have been assembled from a warehouse of used musical-comedy parts. They do not work well together, however well they work individually.The revival that opened in April at the August Wilson Theater — its first on Broadway — only made matters worse. Harvey Fierstein’s meddling with the confusing book confused it further by giving Nick (Ramin Karimloo) more to do; nobody cares what Nick does. And Fanny, whom we do care about, was just too much of a reach for Beanie Feldstein, offering a pleasant performance in a role that shouldn’t be. “Without a stupendous Fanny to thrill and distract,” I wrote at the time, “the musical’s manifold faults become painfully evident.”Lea Michele, who took over the role on Sept. 6, turns out to be that stupendous Fanny. Yes, she even lights up like a light. Both vulnerable and invulnerable, kooky and ardent, she makes the show worth watching again.She can’t make it good, though. Michael Mayer’s production is still garish and pushy, pandering for audience overreaction. A confetti cannon tries to put an exclamation point on a dud dance. Many of the minor players overplay. The lighting by Kevin Adams would make a rat clap, and the unusually ugly set by David Zinn seems weaponized against intimacy. It looks like a missile silo.But at least “Funny Girl” now has a missile: a performer who from her first words (“Hello, Gorgeous”) shoots straight to her target and hits it.It has been a tortuous path to this obviously right and seemingly predestined casting, with decades of false starts involving Lauren Ambrose, Debbie Gibson, Sheridan Smith and others. Feldstein was just another in the long list of misfires; after she ditched the show in a cloud of apparent acrimony — a cloud everyone denied — her standby, Julie Benko, took over.Benko, who is still the Thursday night Fanny, sings the role very well, so you never worry, as you did with Feldstein, that she might not make it through the songs. Then too, Benko gets closer to the dark heart of the comedy, backfilling its shtick with something like anger. Still, good as she is, her voice and the rest of her performance don’t yet match; she even has a different accent when acting the role than when singing it.Like Barbra Streisand, Michele brings added depth to her performance. When Michele sings “People,” our critic writes, it’s not a bald statement but a genuine inquiry.Matthew MurphyMichele matches throughout. Her voice, an exceptional instrument, is not an ornament but a tool, and she knows how to use it. That in itself is no surprise; she seems to have been trying out for the role since 2009. Over the course of her six seasons as Rachel Berry on “Glee,” she sang most of Fanny’s numbers with exceedingly high polish, if sometimes a powerful whiff of Streisand karaoke. (Rachel’s middle name was Barbra.)Onstage, though, the Barbraisms are less in evidence. A few are unavoidable, Streisand having in essence rewritten, and improved, some of Styne’s vocal lines. And in general, anyone hoping to make a success of “Funny Girl” has to follow the originator’s template, because it was created for her — you might almost say “on” her, like a couture gown. The songs work (and the scenes nearly do) when a performer can access a manic desperation to succeed, not caring how she comes off or what she loses in the process. Let’s just say that Michele, like her idol, has that access.What surprised me in “Funny Girl” is that she can also access much more. You need not understand the details of vocal placement to understand that a performer able to belt all of “People” without worrying about switching registers has plenty of bandwidth left over to worry about more important things. When Michele sings the song, it’s not a bald statement but a genuine inquiry: Can Fanny be successful in both love, which means a lot to her, and work, which means more?And at the end, when life has delivered its unhappy answer, Michele isn’t playing at sadness. A hot mess of tears, she takes her time recovering sufficiently to move into the finale, a reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” It’s a mark of her shaping of the role that she sings it quite differently than she did at the end of Act I, when Fanny is reaching outward to grab the life she wants. Now she’s reaching inward to rescue herself from emotional disaster — a point Michele makes with typical vocal daredevilry in the song’s final heart-stopping phrase.Unfortunately, you may not hear it. Despite the amped-up vocals, the amped-up audience is often even louder than Michele. (On Tuesday, one of her several mid-show standing ovations was actually mid-song.) You can’t blame fans for their excitement, and at least there’s something worth being excited about here. But it seems to me that the production is reaping the dubious reward of its constant goading and prodding. You can see Michele having to calculate on the fly how and when to resume, or whether to blast right through, unheeded.Tovah Feldshuh, left, replacing Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother, brings grit to the role.Matthew MurphyIn a way, she’s almost too serious for the show; comedy, at any rate, isn’t her (or its) best suit. That’s a problem when the title is “Funny Girl.” Still, when Michele is given a good situation to play, as when Nick seduces her in a restaurant, she gets good laughs. Other times, as in an embarrassing in-joke added post-Feldstein, coyly referring to a song sung on roller skates in the 1968 movie, she looks lost, even as the audience yuks on cue.I hope she’ll keep burrowing into the role and not give in to the general hysteria. She certainly has allies in that fight: Karimloo, especially as the broken man Nick becomes at the end, does some lovely, quiet work, and Tovah Feldshuh, having replaced the zany Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother, is so gritty and salty she could turn ice into slush. In the smaller role of Florenz Ziegfeld, Peter Francis James remains a model of dignified restraint.Charismatic performers make the thing they’re performing disappear. In effect, they replace it; their voice becomes its voice, their skin its story. That Michele makes “Funny Girl” seem better than we know it to be is the wonderful but possibly irreproducible product of the mutual need between an old-fashioned talent on the way up and an old-fashioned musical on the way down. It’s a need like that of lovers, and you know what the song says about them: Despite all evidence, they’re the luckiest people in the world.Funny GirlAt the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; funnygirlonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Funny Girl’ Review: Broadway Revival Shows Why It Took So Long

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      Beanie Feldstein stars as the comic Fanny Brice in the show’s return after almost 60 years.It must be a plot. Why else would it have taken nearly 60 years for “Funny Girl,” the hit 1964 musical about the comic Fanny Brice, to be revived on Broadway, when most Golden Age shows with even half a wit left in them — let alone such a fabulous score — have been revived unto exhaustion?And why does the mild version that finally made it, in a production starring Beanie Feldstein that opened Sunday at the August Wilson Theater, seem likely to prolong rather than break the spell?That I can answer in two words: Barbra Streisman.Or so Jerome Robbins, who “supervised” the original production, misspelled the name of an exciting young singer, then about 20, on a list of possible Fannys he drew up around 1962. That list, which also included such established stars as Judy Holliday, Eydie Gormé and Tammy Grimes, put Streisand, as she was properly but barely known, in third place.She was first on Jule Styne’s list, though. The show’s composer deliberately wrote the “toughest score” he could — rangy and histrionic in places, delicate and restrained in others — so “only Barbra could sing it.”And so it has been. As the show developed, coiling itself around Streisand’s offbeat, aggressive, once-in-a-lifetime talent — not to mention her Brice-like nose, which shows up repeatedly in Bob Merrill’s lyrics — the odds of a truly successful successor diminished. And without a stupendous Fanny to thrill and distract, the musical’s manifold faults become painfully evident.Feldstein with Kurt Csolak, left, and Justin Prescott in the show, directed by Michael Mayer.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo rip the bandage off quickly: Feldstein is not stupendous. She’s good. She’s funny enough in places, and immensely likable always, as was already evident from her performances in the movies “Booksmart” and “Lady Bird” and, on Broadway, in “Hello, Dolly!” You root for her to raise the roof, but she only bumps against it a little. Her voice, though solid and sweet and clear, is not well suited to the music, and you feel her working as hard as she can to power through the gap. But working hard at what should be naturally extraordinary is not in Fanny’s DNA.Still, you can’t blame Feldstein for the show’s problems; that would be like blaming the clown for the elephants. The main elephant is the book, written by Isobel Lennart and fiddled with for this production by Harvey Fierstein, to no avail. Tracing Brice’s rise from gawky waif to Ziegfeld star between 1910 and 1927, along with the corresponding decline of her romance with the “gorgeous” gambler Nick Arnstein (Ramin Karimloo), it bites off more than it can chew and then, at least in Michael Mayer’s production, repeatedly refuses to chew it.The highlights-only approach is a problem in most biographical musicals, exacerbated in “Funny Girl” by its unusually high quotient of fictionalization. Brice’s family was well off, not poor, but the rags-to-riches arc made the plot more appealing. When she met Arnstein, she was no innocent, as suggested by songs like “You Are Woman, I Am Man”; she’d been married already — and he still was. The famous Ziegfeld number in which she stuffs her wedding gown to appear pregnant (“His Love Makes Me Beautiful”) never happened, and if it had, she’d have been fired.Feldstein in “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” a Ziegfeld number that Fanny plays up for laughs by stuffing her wedding gown to appear pregnant.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut those distortions at least make a good story. The bigger distortions — perhaps necessitated by the fact that Ray Stark, who produced the original, was Brice’s son-in-law — avoid one. Arnstein did not get involved in illegal activities because he hated being supported by Fanny; he was a crook and a jailbird who had been gladly sponging off her from the beginning. Yet Brice, knowing all that, still adored him, which makes a far more interesting tale than the bowdlerized one the show offers, of a duped woman finally and regretfully seeing the light.That Arnstein wasn’t remotely gorgeous, and Karimloo totally is, we can allow. Karimloo also sings beautifully and, to the extent the new book tries to beef up the role, he’s got the beef to do it.Unfortunately the effort is counterproductive. The song “Temporary Arrangement,” in which Nick expresses his mounting fury, has been retrieved from the Styne-Merrill trunk, where it was stashed after one performance in 1964 and should have remained; its intensity comes out of nowhere and rips at the show’s thin fabric. A bit later, Nick gets a version of the title song, which though shot for the 1968 film, starring Streisand and Omar Sharif, was cut for good cause.More happily, when Feldstein sings her own version of “Funny Girl” near the end of the show, it’s simple and touching — not overstretched like her merely loud renditions of the big three hits: “I’m the Greatest Star,” “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”Perhaps that’s because she’s finally just sitting down with no one else onstage. (Most of the musical staging, by Ellenore Scott, is hectic.) But if Fierstein’s stabs at strengthening the secondary characters pull focus from the central one, they do help the production in small ways. As Fanny’s mother, the naturally eccentric comic Jane Lynch brings us closest to the Brice spirit, suggesting in “Who Taught Her Everything She Knows?” that zany ambition is a heritable trait. And though Jared Grimes, as Fanny’s pal Eddie Ryan, is somewhat wasted in that song, he earlier makes a fine cameo of the production’s most notable dance, a stunning tap sequence choreographed by Ayodele Casel.Jared Grimes, center, with, foreground from left: Feldstein, Jane Lynch, Toni DiBuono, Amber Ardolino and Leslie Blake Walker.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the sequence has little to do with the story is not a deal-breaker; in “Funny Girl,” it may even be an advantage. Nor are Fierstein’s anachronisms and vulgar jokes about sex with chorines and men in trench coats catastrophic. This is not a unified work like Styne’s 1959 hit, “Gypsy,” arguably just as fictional in its portrait of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee yet one of the indisputably great musicals. In that show, no song was allowed to serve less than double duty; everything pointed back to the plot. “Funny Girl” reaches for the same complexity but most often contents itself, except in its best songs, with mere entertainment.If the revival actually provided enough of that, it might prove irresistible. But Mayer’s staging, which at times seems to aim for the ghostly nostalgia of “Follies,” feels lumbering and underfunded, with cheap-looking sets (by David Zinn), a cast of 22 in place of the original 43 and wan new orchestrations for 14 players, based on the glorious originals by Ralph Burns for 25. (You’re going to sell me “People” with two violins?) Only the aptly gaudy costumes by Susan Hilferty suggest the Ziegfeldian overabundance that shows like “Funny Girl” were designed to purvey.This could all have been predicted; over the years, many revivals have been attempted and defeated because the thing a revival is trying to revive is not to be found in the property itself. It’s in the personality of the necessary star: someone not nice but inevitable, not diligent but explosive, not well-rounded but weird. They don’t grow them that way much, anymore, nor write new material for them. Paging Ms. Streisman!Funny GirlAt the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; funnygirlonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More