FUNNY GIRL
Music by Jule Styne
Lyrics by Bob Merrill
Book by Isobel Lennart
Revised Book by Harvey Weinstein
August Wilson Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
I don’t think it serves the matter spending too much time on Funny Girl. What you’ve heard as a consensus (if you’ve been listening) is largely true: Beanie Feldstein is inadequate to the task. But it’s an odd sort of inadequacy. She’s like the community theatre favorite that everyone loves because she’s “so professional”: she can move, her face is appropriately expressive, she loves musical theatre enough to have a certain facility of delivery that does, indeed, indicate an understanding of what a polished performance looks like…but relative to what a truly seasoned and spectacular musical theatre performer is like on a real Broadway stage…she simply doesn’t have that kind of game.
This was my first exposure to her, and I’m perfectly happy to believe that, giving the film performances for which she is most noted, she’s quite something; she just hasn’t harnessed it in this revival. Of all things, she reminded me of the contrast between Wayne Rogers and George Segal.
Rogers had been perfectly charming in the first three seasons of M*A*S*H as Dr. Trapper John McIntyre, and likewise in a subsequent period detective series called City of Angels (not to be confused with the musical). Thereafter I saw him in a Long Island revival of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw—and he was an energy suck. Not just disappointing; not merely bland; but a black hole in the middle of the production. (Ms. Feldstein is nowhere near that bad.)
By contrast, the first time I saw George Segal onstage, he was among the stars-of-the-week in the ever-changing cast of read-it-down Love Letters by A.R. Gurney. And not only was he everything you’d wish he might have been, he was exactly as he seemed to be on film, as if there was no difference between his stage and film technique; and that was the surprise; he was just natural and real and perfect and you never caught him acting. He was absolutely, authentically George Segal. (Ms. Feldstein is, of course, nowhere near as good.)
The point, however, is that you can never entirely be sure how a performer with serious chops in one medium will perform in another, and Ms. Feldstein seems to be right between Rogers and Segal: her stage technique is lacking, but her attractive persona survives, and I can see where screen-Beanie may have seemed a fair candidate for stage Fanny…in the abstract.
As to the rest: the budget-tour-looking and attenuated-seeming production helmed by director Michael Mayer doesn’t give anyone much support. Ramon Karimloo is a very decent Nick Arnstein (if you’ll forgive the contradiction in terms), Jared Grimes as Fanny’s adoring just-friend and mentor deserves his Tony nomination for pizzazzing a thankless role; and Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother is one of those off-center casting choices you just kind of make a pact with and get used to, because she’s good enough to take you on the ride anyway.
And since we are all gentlepersons of some compassion, let us speak no more of this.