Funny Girl

Before The Broadway Album, before even beloved Yentl, there was Funny Girl. The Barbra Streisand Broadway vehicle transferred to the screen in 1968 and forever imprinted Babs’s beguiling nasal drone onto the American psyche. The musical follows spunky, homely vaudevillian Fanny Brice (Sheperd in the Streisand role) as she clamors her way from humble origins to theatrical stardom. The elusive Nick Arnstein (Stewart)—a wealthy fan who cultivates and marries Fanny but ends up eclipsed by her talent—proves Funny Girl’s crucial foil.

Though effervescent, Osetek’s production overlooks much of what makes Fanny Fanny. She is, above all, a Jew from New York’s turn-of-the-century tenements, a self-described “bagel on a plate full of onion rolls.” Her (often money-related) conflicts with the milky-white Nick, and her determination to steamroll past them, stem from her outsiderly past. But the director glosses over all of this. Fanny’s mother, Mrs. Brice (a spirited Smitko), for example, appears at one moment in lustrous, plum-hued layers and a dark, becoming stole. She proceeds to emote in a broad, Brooklyn-Jersey affect that’s, if anything, Italian. Whence the marvelous outfit? And where’s the Ashkenazi lilt? The general inattention to detail leaves the script’s folksy, Borscht Belt humor feeling simultaneously awkward and overlooked.

As a musical revue, however, the production doesn’t disappoint. A nine-piece orchestra ably assists this two-dozen-plus ensemble. In early group numbers, over-busy choreography nearly eclipses Sheperd. Fortunately, her final, impassioned sung soliloquies make a serious case to put the DVD down and see the damn thing live.

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