Michael Mayer had one eye on his “Funny Girl” cast and one eye on his phone. The cast was rehearsing “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” a comic song from the musical’s first act. And the phone was humming with texts from Harvey Fierstein, on board to fine-tune the script, under Mayer’s direction.
The number finds Fanny Brice, the title character, getting her big shot, leaving behind a dinky music hall for a featured role in the grand Ziegfeld Follies. She’s there as the butt of the joke, surrounded by leggy showgirls, each a bride-to-be staring admiringly into a hand mirror.
But Fanny turns the joke inside out, secretly stuffing her bridal gown so that when the audience and the dancers see her, she’s hugely pregnant.
Eight days into rehearsal, Beanie Feldstein, who will star as Fanny in the first Broadway production of “Funny Girl” since Barbra Streisand originated the role in 1964, was angling for laughs. In a white mask, black sweater (stuffed) and two-tone leggings, she scuttled among the dancers as if carrying triplets (and not small ones at that).
“Oy! Oy! I’m falling,” she improvised. Later: “I’m shvitzing.”
One more bit of schtick: Leaning against a lithe male dancer, she clutched her baby bump. “Oy, he’s kicking.”
What name for this Jewish boy-to-be would land the laugh? Mayer and a texting Fierstein had thoughts.
Milty? Marvin? Arnold? Moishe? Mayer shouted them out.
“Moishe? Or Moishy?” Feldstein, a little breathless, yelled back.
Moishy it was, at this rehearsal at least.
For Feldstein, 28, rehearsing to play Fanny Brice was the culmination of a lifelong dream that began as a Los Angeles girl infatuated — no, obsessed — with musical theater. A girl who, for her third birthday, dressed as Fanny, wearing a leopard-print jacket and hat that echoed a costume Streisand wore in the 1968 film of “Funny Girl,” which won her a best actress Oscar.
That any actress was rehearsing to play Fanny Brice was a culmination, too. The matchless pairing of performer and part — both Fanny and Barbra were self-deprecating singers with outsize dreams — sent Streisand into the showbiz stratosphere. But “Funny Girl” disappeared from the Broadway stage.
“Having had Barbra Streisand in that role almost froze the musical,” said Barbara Hogenson, the literary agent representing the show’s librettist, who over two decades has attended many a meeting to talk about revivals. “People were very cautious because of the possibility of comparison.”
Over the years there have been lists and lists. Campaigners for the part, and slow deciders. Backstage chatter about who could sing the enormous role — and did she have to be, like Brice and Streisand, Jewish?
Just take a look at the casting call for a stab at an earlier Broadway revival:
“The woman who will play Fanny Brice must have an unforgettably thrilling voice with a big range (E below middle C to a high F; Mezzo with a high mix or belt) and great comic skill, masking deep insecurity and pain. She is a once-in-a-generation talent, and must have excellent comedic timing.”
That production never happened. It’s one of many bumps along a nearly six-decade path that winds from New York to London and back; that involves at various points the “Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy, the television actress Lauren Ambrose and the pop singer Debbie Gibson; and that features a triumphant stop in Paris and a bleak reckoning in Green Bay, Wis.
But now, on March 26 — 58 years to the day that it opened on Broadway — “Funny Girl” is scheduled to begin performances at the August Wilson Theater, with Feldstein, in her stuffed bridal gown, joined by Ramin Karimloo, Jane Lynch and Jared Grimes in a cast of 28.
It’s a $15 million production in a very anxious Broadway season, but Feldstein seems remarkably calm. “It’s so in my bones,” she said during a break in rehearsal. “I used to run around the house in my pajamas screaming ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ pretending my dog was the tugboat.”
Telling the Fanny Brice Story
The producer Ray Stark was married to Frances Arnstein, the daughter of the stage and radio star Fanny Brice, and in the late 1950s he set out to make a film of his mother-in-law’s life story. Born Fania Borach to Jewish immigrants in 1891, Brice started performing as a kid and vaulted to fame as a burlesque house comic.
The Hollywood veteran Isobel Lennart wrote the screenplay, but after consultations with actresses, Stark decided to turn the story into a stage musical. He hired the composer Jule Styne (“Bells Are Ringing”) and the lyricist Bob Merrill (“Carnival”) to write the score.
That was the easy part. The director, Jerome Robbins, had problems with Lennart’s book, and quit, with Garson Kanin taking over. Names like Anne Bancroft and Carol Burnett were floated for the title role, but even then, some argued that only a Jewish actress could make it work.
Streisand, who had drawn great notices in her Broadway debut in a supporting part, checked that box. And she understood Fanny, whose mother sings “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” to introduce the character near the top of the show. “I knew I looked weird — that I wasn’t anybody’s idea of an ingénue,” Streisand told The New York Times in 1964. “I knew then I had to be a star or nothing.”
But Fanny’s climb to fame was only half the story; “Funny Girl” was also about her ill-fated marriage to the gambler Nick Arnstein, and the show’s two halves could feel as mismatched as the spouses themselves.
The New York opening was postponed five times as changes were made out of town. When it finally happened, Streisand owned the stage, earning glowing reviews in many cases better than the show (“oozes with a thick helping of sticky sentimentality”).
Yet “Funny Girl” was a major hit, playing 1,348 performances (half after Streisand left the cast). The musical toured the country; Streisand briefly returned to the role on the West End in London.
The show, though, had the bad fortune to open in the same season as “Hello, Dolly!” It went empty-handed at the Tony Awards, despite eight nominations and a score featuring eventual standards like “People.”
In the years since, so many Golden Age musicals have been rethought, rewritten, revamped and revived. Why not “Funny Girl”?
“I don’t have a really good reason,” said Jack Viertel, the author of “The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built.” “God knows there have been other imperfect shows, like ‘On the Town,’ that have been.”
He should know. As the artistic director of City Center’s “Encores!” series for some 20 years, he would regularly check in with the rights holders — Hogenson, representing Lennart; Styne (and later his widow); and Merrill’s wife — to see if he could put together a concert-style staging.
The answer was always not yet, though as Hogenson said, “If he wouldn’t call, I would have been worried.”
Encores! did present another backstage musical based on a real figure, with music by Jule Styne to boot: “Gypsy.” The show has proved you could find new ways to match a performance that seemed impossible to repeat: Ethel Merman as the stage mother Rose Hovick.
Since its 1959 premiere, “Gypsy” has been revived on Broadway with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Linda Lavin, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone as Rose. Betty Buckley, Bette Midler and Imelda Staunton have played the part, too.
The Tour Cut Short
Building a revival around an idiosyncratic performer was one thought for reviving “Funny Girl.” In the early 1990s Sandra Bernhard auditioned for the producers Barry and Fran Weissler. But the plan didn’t lift off.
In 1996 a “Funny Girl” production bubbled up with big aspirations. The former teen pop star Debbie Gibson, then 26, was brought onboard to play Fanny.
She had already appeared on Broadway in “Les Misérables” and in London in “Grease.” Nick Arnstein would be the Tony nominee Robert Westenberg, in a 40-city tour that had its eye on New York as a final destination.
Gibson, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island, “felt connected to my Italian roots,” she said in an email, but also to the Jewish community, which “I felt I could respectfully represent.”
Two weeks before the show was to open in Pittsburgh, cast members previewed four songs for the New York media. “We’ve eliminated the drops between scenes,” the director Sammy Dallas Bayes told Playbill.com of his approach. “Audiences don’t want to see that; now everything is fast fast fast. That’s why this is more a ‘revisal’ than a revival.”
After only five stops, poor advance ticket sales brought the tour to an early end in Green Bay.
“I don’t think our rehearsal period was long enough to mount a show of this magnitude,” Gibson said in her email.
“Though the critics were unkind at times,” she added, “the audiences gave us standing ovations and were very receptive.”
Gibson and her mother threw a goodbye party after the last performance on Nov. 10, 1996. All was not lost: She recorded four songs from the show on two albums.
The ‘Girl’ That Got Away
Bartlett Sher, the Tony-winning director of acclaimed musical revivals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” declined this month to talk about “Funny Girl.”
But a decade ago, all eyes were on him as the creative force who would, at long last, bring the show back to Broadway.
The lead producer, Bob Boyett, had secured the rights and went public with plans to mount a revival with Sher directing. The production planned to start in Los Angeles and — assuming all went well — quickly transfer to Broadway.
In an unusual move, the producers opened up their Fanny search online, allowing women 21 to 35, including nonprofessionals, to submit audition videos.
“This is the hardest part I’ve ever had to cast,” Sher told The Times in 2011, adding that while the net would be wide, there was no commitment to selecting from the video pool.
Reached this month, Boyett acknowledged that the “Glee” star Lea Michele, who had marched through the audience singing “Don’t Rain on My Parade” at the 2010 Tony Awards, had made a play for the role. But in August 2011 producers announced that Lauren Ambrose, best known as the prickly Claire Fisher on TV’s “Six Feet Under,” would be their star.
“It was a wonderful surprise,” Sher, who had directed her in a play, told The Times. “She wasn’t honestly a front-runner for the part until she called me, asked to audition and came in and blew us all away.”
In early October, even before the Los Angeles run, producers announced a 2012 New York opening date at the Imperial Theater. By November, it was all over.
Boyett said an open theater on Broadway had accelerated plans before crucial creative decisions could be made. And he was unable to raise the money for a lavish show budgeted at a whopping-for-the time $13 million to $14 million.
He swatted away scuttlebutt that casting Ambrose was the problem, while agreeing that it was part of what made investors hesitate. “Some people were holding back because they thought it was a big budget,” Boyett said. “And some people do such an incredible job of endowing a role the first time it’s hard to think of them being replaced.”
In a 2018 interview, Ambrose recalled the shock. “We were two weeks away from rehearsal,” she said. “Obviously it was a bummer, but as an actor, really, truly, it’s easy come, easy go. These things, they come together and they fall apart all the time.”
True enough. And that year, Ambrose got a crack at another classic plum role, playing Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” for Lincoln Center Theater.
She was nominated for a Tony Award. Bartlett Sher was her director.
London Calling
Sonia Friedman, now a powerhouse producer in London and New York, came to appreciate “Funny Girl” by hearing her older sister, Maria Friedman, perform “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in concert.
She made her first pitch for the rights in the late 1990s, she said, proposing a “pared-down” version, for British audiences, that would put story, not spectacle, front and center — and would be a vehicle for Maria, by then a London theater star.
“It looked like it might happen,” Friedman said, “and then Maria got pregnant. She moved on, I moved on.”
Still, Friedman kept circling, inquiring. “Like all things you discover when you’re in this industry,” she said, “it can take a very, very long time from having discussions with rights holders to actually signing a piece of paper.”
After the Ambrose-Sher production fell apart, Friedman thought she had another shot, only to learn that the “Glee” producer Ryan Murphy had snagged the rights. The plan was for Lea Michele’s character to audition for the role on the TV series, and then — in real life — star in the show on Broadway.
The “Funny Girl” story line on “Glee” happened, in 2013-14. But a Murphy-Michele stage collaboration never did.
Sheridan Smith happened, instead.
Friedman and the American producer Scott Landis got the rights to produce “Funny Girl,” aiming it for the Menier Chocolate Factory, the celebrated 180-seat London theater that had developed a track record for small-scale musical revivals with an outsize impact. And Smith — an unknown to American audiences who had won a British following on television and in musicals like “Legally Blonde” — was selected as Fanny.
The cast and creative team were British, except for the director, Mayer (a Tony winner for “Spring Awakening”), and, eventually, Fierstein, who was recruited to revise the book. More than in 1964, the story of a talented woman punishing herself for loving a ne’er-do-well might prove hard to take.
What did “Funny Girl” need? “To help us understand Nicky’s frustrations and Nicky’s difficulties and Nicky’s addictions,” Friedman said. “It would be very easy to play him as a single note, and in this production we don’t.” (The team added songs for the character that were cut for the movie, which they believed would help, too.)
Even before “Funny Girl” opened at the Chocolate Factory on Dec. 2, 2015, producers announced that it would transfer to the West End. It was a box-office hit there, too. Smith’s performance — Mayer compares her to the Italian film actress Giulietta Masina — mixed pathos and comedy and earned raves from London critics.
“It’s impossible not to like Ms. Smith as Fanny,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times. “It is equally difficult to believe her.”
But for Mayer, the performance proved something important: “It took the curse off needing to Be Like Barbra,” he said.
A Call for Beanie
The “Funny Girl” producing team — which had come to include David Babani, the Chocolate Factory’s artistic director — chose to wait a year after the show wrapped its British tour before revving up talks for a Broadway transfer.
They knew it had to be bigger, and to make sense for a New York audience. “If ‘Funny Girl’ had been on Broadway even once in the last 58 years, we could have done this teeny-tiny pocket production,” Mayer explained. “There’s something intimate about the story, but it still wants to have all the excitement — it’s brassy, it’s big, there’s lots of tap dancing.”
“And,” he added, “the dream was it would be great to find a Jewish girl.”
That meant going back to The List. “Every TV show you watch, every movie you watch — you’re just constantly looking for your Fanny Brice,” Hogenson said.
Idina Menzel rose to the top of the list, but didn’t commit, Hogenson said. “We waited a while,” she added.
“Idina was in conversations for the project at one point, but she was never confirmed for the role and ultimately timing didn’t work out,” her publicist said in a statement this week.
Then a brainstorm from Mayer: the comic actress Beanie Feldstein. He had seen her on film as a lovable sidekick in “Lady Bird” and “Booksmart.” She had shown she could sing in a supporting role in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway.
“This was someone you could really connect with,” Mayer said. “She’s funny and smart and self-deprecating.”
And she was a Streisand superfan, having seen the “Funny Girl” movie “hundreds of times.” She’d even seen the stage show in one of its relatively rare stagings: an English-language production at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris, where Christina Bianco — among other things, a well-known Barbra Streisand impressionist — played Fanny Brice to great acclaim in 2019-20.
Feldstein was asked to audition in early 2021. Sequestered alone in Los Angeles while filming her role as Monica Lewinsky in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” she Zoomed with Mayer and the “Funny Girl” musical supervisor and director Michael Rafter to prepare. She taped herself singing four songs for the producers and the rights holders.
The phone call with life-changing news came early one morning after a late-night shoot. She was still in her pajamas. And she hadn’t ever told her parents that she had auditioned.
“You know when something feels right, and this feels right,” Friedman said. (Among those offering congratulations on Twitter was Lea Michele, who wrote, “YOU are the greatest star!!”)
Fast forward to 2022, and a rehearsal room like any other — except for the masks and the Covid tests and the long shadow of an incomparable superstar.
It’s a crowded and competitive spring on Broadway, and the show’s producers want to stress that the story of an early 20th-century entertainer can still be meaningful. “Funny Girl,” after all, is about a career woman, and Fierstein is proud to have folded an actual Fanny Brice monologue into the latest script, showing her to be a comic pioneer.
The woman playing that comic pioneer gets it.
“Look, as Beanie I will to my last — knock on wood — love Barbra forever,” Feldstein said. “She is the reason we all know this piece. But for my task bringing it back in 2022, I can’t be her.”
“My job is to be Beanie’s version of Fanny Brice,” she added, “and not Barbra’s version of Fanny Brice. But I say that with the most love and adoration.”
