Review: A 'Funny Girl' production worthy of revival
'Funny Girl,' the first production of the Broadway Lights series, runs through Sunday at the Belk Theater
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 18, 2023. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here.
‘Funny Girl’ shines brightly with a lead that embodies the role Barbra Streisand made famous 60 years ago — and a story that still applies today
Katerina McCrimmon stars as Fanny Brice in the national tour of “Funny Girl,” which opens the Broadway Lights series and runs through Sunday at the Belk Theater. (Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
by Lawrence Toppman
It’s both easy and hard to understand why “Funny Girl” waited 48 years for a Broadway revival in 2022.
Easy to understand, because Barbra Streisand cast an intimidating shadow over the title role: She earned a 1964 Tony nomination for a career-making performance as Fanny Brice, won the Oscar for it four years later, headed an original cast recording that’s in the Grammy Hall of Fame, had a top-5 hit with “People” and recorded multiple songs from Brice’s career. She WAS Brice, an unbeautiful Jewish girl whose talent and incontrovertible will made her a star.
Yet it’s also hard to understand, because the show contains Jule Styne’s last great score, a still-meaningful book about female empowerment by Isobel Lennart (updated by Harvey Fierstein for the revival), and a moral applicable to every arena from religion to politics: Judge people by their accomplishments, not appearances.
Katerina McCrimmon has the leading role in the national tour, which opens the Broadway Lights series at Belk Theater this week. She proves you needn’t be Streisand, a New Yorker or Jewish to embody the dynamo who became a stage, radio and film star in the early 20th century.
Her Brice has an extra edge of desperation: Fanny’s immense need for love manifests itself as a cry for attention, a frantic desire to please or a blundering attempt to help ill-fated gambler Nick Arnstein stay solvent, so their marriage can succeed. When she sings her first big number, “I’m the Greatest Star,” she seems to be trying to convince herself as much as dance coach Eddie Ryan and us.
McCrimmon finds the right tone for every aspect of Brice’s moods. She can scale down her powerful voice, which never seems to spend all its reserves, to a softer sound that conveys pathos. She’s funny both as Brice in private and Brice on the Ziegfeld Follies stage: As Private Schwartz from Rockaway, wearing bagels like tiny life preservers on his uniform in a World War I number, she’s a hoot. (Schwartz’ flapping mustache, which shifted oddly until McCrimmon tossed it at the crowd, was either a stroke of genius by director Michael Mayer or a happy accident.)
Directors have been freshening musicals from the Golden Age of Broadway: bringing the Nazi menace into sharper relief in “The Sound of Music,” showing the harsh life of islanders in “South Pacific,” having Eliza Doolittle walk away from controlling Henry Higgins at the end of “My Fair Lady.”
But “Funny Girl” doesn’t need that kind of updating, and the few additions and changes don’t strengthen it. Fierstein beefed up Arnstein’s lines, and he has more to sing, but he remains a dull character: a reckless semi-cad who prates about needing his freedom (to go broke, mainly). Stephen Mark Lukas sings and acts well, but who can give substance to such a shadow?
Second billing in the playbill has been awarded to Melissa Manchester as Rosie Brice, Fanny’s sympathetic mother. She earns it by nailing the voice of a New Yorker — as McCrimmon does — and conveying the shrewd pragmatism of a matriarch who has suffered herself. (Unlike McCrimmon, Manchester comes from a Jewish family in the Bronx.)
The show has become more tap-heavy than before. That gives the small ensemble, which features Davidson native Jordon Taylor, a chance to kick up a mini-storm. Izaiah Montaque Harris stands out as Ryan, who’s given a chance to stop the show in an extended tap solo and seizes it with both feet.
If You’re Going: “Funny Girl” runs through Sunday at Belk Theater, 130 N. Tryon St. Tickets cost $30 to $124.50. Get them at carolinatix.org or call 704-372-1000.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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