‘Funny Girl’ Broadway Review: No Rain On Beanie Feldstein’s Parade, But Expect Some Drizzle
deadline.comSmartly sidestepping the obvious comparison from the start – the line-reading of “Hello gorgeous” sounds more conversational, less sing-songy than the one etched in our brains for all these decades – Broadway’s new Funny Girl revival doesn’t so much make a grand play for replacement as a peaceful offering for coexistence: The show that made Barbra Streisand a musical theater icon likely won’t do the same for its latest star, but neither is it cause for grumbling how-dare-shes.Opening tonight at the August Wilson Theatre, Beanie Feldstein is, it turns out, a perfectly fine choice for this Funny Girl, which is not to say she’s perfect, but rather that she’s on equal footing with a just-above-average musical that has always been dominated by several excellent songs and a legendary breakout performance that lifted the show – and its plodding 1968 movie adaptation – well beyond the sum of its parts.So memorable are those Jule Styne/Bob Merrill songs – the now-standards “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” most notably – that the first hints of their arrivals in the new staging directed by Michael Mayer get applause before Feldstein, as Fanny Brice, so much as sings a note.
The fact that this amiable young performer does battle with a most fearsome ghost and survives with her dignity and our collective sense of relief intact should not be underappreciated.With some revision and modernizing of Isobel Lennart’s book by Harvey Fierstein – not nearly enough revision, but more on that later – the Funny Girl revival struggles to make a case for the musical’s place in Broadway history without the performer who put it there in the first place, and that, I think, is a losing battle.
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