Musicals at Shaw and Stratford: Funny Girl and Guys and Dolls

Sara Farb as Fanny Brice (understudied by Jade Repetta at the performance our critic attended) in Funny Girl. (Photo: David Cooper.)

Since Funny Girl made Barbra Streisand a Broadway star and the 1968 William Wyler movie version enshrined what may be the greatest musical-comedy performance ever recorded, it took more than half a century for the show to generate a major revival. The one-two punch of Streisand’s stage and film triumphs created the impression that the musical was mostly a decorative shell constructed around her, despite the superb score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and what the threadbare musical bios of the last couple of decades – Jersey Boys, Beautiful and many others – now reveal by contrast to be a creditable book by Isobel Lennart. Funny Girl was finally revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2015 with Sheridan Smith in the role of the Ziegfeld Follies singer-comic Fanny Brice; Smith was marvelous, but when the show transferred to the West End, her health problems delayed her appearance, and for the first half of the run she was replaced by her understudy, Natasha Barnes, who received reviews that can only be called generous. (I saw both actresses; Smith’s performance was filmed in 2018 and can be seen on BroadwayHD.) And Smith was the only reason to see it: Michael Mayer’s production, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, was clumsy and looked seedy. Those qualities were very much in evidence when the revival opened on Broadway four years ago, with an apparently disastrous leading performance by Beanie Feldstein, who left the run early and was replaced by Lea Michele. (It was Michele I reviewed.)

The Broadway retread was a hit, but its infelicities didn’t do much to redeem the musical’s status. The current mounting at the Shaw Festival in Ontario, which is beautifully directed (by Eda Holmes), impressively choreographed (by Parker Esse) and handsomely produced, with rousing musical direction by Paul Sportelli, certainly should. Lennart keeps to the conventional structure of musical bios. The first half tracks the ascent of Brice’s star while the second deals mostly with the disintegration of her marriage to gambler Nicky Arnstein, who serves a prison sentence when he participates in a phony bond deal. Act two is problematic, but the dialogue is funnier and more hard-boiled than in many other stage and screen musical bios. It’s not Gypsy, but it’s not bad, and though Nicky’s part is underwritten, the narrative is never less than compelling.

If you only know the movie (as most of its fans would at this point), the restoration of the original score might be a little jarring. The movie interpolated three of Brice’s signature songs (“I’d Rather Be Blue,” “Second Hand Rose” and “My Man”), substituted a new Styne title tune for “Who Are You Now?,“ eliminated the two comic numbers for Fanny’s mother Rose and Fanny’s pal Eddie, and invented a parody of Swan Lake to paper over the WWI marching song “Rat-a-Tat-Tat.” (Both of these Follies numbers were meant to represent Fanny’s Yiddish dialect repertoire.) Merrill also wrote more verses of the first song, “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty,” that didn’t make it into the film. The biggest change was “My Man,” which replaced the original eleven o’clock number, “The Music That Makes Me Dance.” “My Man” is a Follies song in which Fanny begins by carrying her dismay onstage at losing Nick – who has just returned from prison to tell her the marriage is off – and then, in a dazzling shift, it ends up embodying her indomitability and determination to carry on without him. Wyler shot it in one take, and it’s the most extraordinary display of Streisand’s musical and dramatic gifts in the two-and-a-half-hour picture.

What a first-rate revival of the Broadway show like the one at Shaw does is to allow the happy co-existence of both versions of the score. “Who Are You Now?” and “Cornet Man” and especially “The Music That Makes Me Dance” – one of Styne’s all-time best ballads – are welcome returns; so is the Rose-Eddie duet, “Who Taught Her Everything She Knows?,” which is utterly charming as Patty Jamieson and Matt Alfano perform it and showcases Alfano’s sensational dancing. Bringing back their other song (shared with Janelle Cooper as Rosie’s poker buddy Mrs. Strakosh), “Find Yourself a Man,” adds nothing of significance. But “Rat-a-Tat-Tat” has always been more fun than “Swan Lake,” though Streisand protests in her memoir that the latter was better before most of it landed on the cutting-room floor. Funny Girl isn’t really a dance show, so “Rat-a-Tat-Tat” gives Esse a chance to show off.

The night I saw Funny Girl, the star, Sara Farb, was out, and her understudy, Jade Repetta, stood in for her. She was fantastic, and her rhythms were distinctive – her own, not Streisand’s. She refreshed both the laugh lines and the dramatic moments: you didn’t feel you were merely listening to copies. She doesn’t have Streisand’s musical instincts or range, but nobody does. Repeta’s renditions of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “The Music That Makes Me Dance” did honor to the two peaks in the score. The one piece Repetta couldn’t quite pull off was the “Private Schwartz from Rockaway” section of “Rat-a-Tat-Tat,” but it didn’t work for Sheridan Smith either.

I recall Qasam Khan’s performance in the title role of The Playboy of the Western World at Shaw three years ago with much fondness, and he’s certainly handsome and sexy enough to play Nick Arnstein. And though he’s not really a singer, his voice is adequate for Nick’s few songs, especially the ingenious seduction duet with Fanny, “You Are Woman, I Am Man.” But Khan doesn’t seem comfortable in the role. At the beginning of “You Are Woman,” he makes the smart choice to put quotation marks around the macho lyrics, but then he drops the idea; I wish he’d followed through. It was a joy to listen to Janelle Cooper’s gospel-infused alto. And the constantly surprising Damien Atkins does more with the role of Ziegfeld than you’d think possible: he brings genuine wit as well as heart to the character. The 1910s clothes James Lavoie has designed for the production look especially good on Atkins’s slender frame, especially a royal blue trenchcoat he wears at the end of the first act. I enjoyed the costumes overall (and also Lavoie’s set), but he makes one perplexing mistake. Fanny becomes a Broadway star and makes pots of money, yet in act two Patty Jamieson, who gives a solid performance as Rose, is still wearing the proletarian dresses she wore in act one when she was a lowly saloonkeeper. Wouldn’t Fanny have treated her mother to a few shopping excursions?

The company of Guys and Dolls. (Photo: David Hou.)

Jade Repeta wasn’t the only understudy I saw during my time in Ontario. In Stratford’s Guys and Dolls Alex Kelly replaced the usual Sky Masterson, Dan Chameroy. With more rehearsal time, Kelly no doubt could have worked out a few more interesting physical choices, but he should be proud of himself: he brought real feeling not just to the wonderful songs Frank Loesser wrote for his character but also to his straight scenes.

Vocally this is a strong Guys and Dolls. Music director/conductor Franklin Brasz deserves kudos along with the singers – Mark Uhre as Nathan Detroit, Jennifer Rider-Shaw as Miss Adelaide, Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane as Sarah Brown, Steve Ross as Nicely-Nicely Johnson, Gabriel Antonacci as Benny Southstreet and Stephen Patterson as Arvide Abernathy, whose rendition of the often overlooked “More I Cannot Wish You” is tender and sweet. It was the acting I mostly didn’t care for. The director, Donna Feore, encourages the company to play for shtick rather than acting values. That includes supporting players like Starr Domingue as General Cartwright and Juan Chioran as Big Jule, so what they come up with in their first minute or two on stage turns out to be all we’re going to get. The designers – Michael Gianfrancesco on sets, Dana Osborne on costumes, Bonnie Beecher on lighting – make the production glow but the performances are mostly tin-plated.

Guys and Dolls has a brilliantly constructed book (by Abe Burrows and Jo Swerling) and a magnificent score, and this version certainly has its pleasures. The best thing about it, aside from its look, is the dancing by the male ensemble in the Havana number, the “Crapshooters’ Dance,” “Luck Be a Lady” and the end of the curtain call. These fellows are gymnasts as well as spectacular dancers. Feore also choreographed the musical, and her balletic contributions are superb. “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” enchants the audience; it always does, though Ross overplays the verses. And “Runyonland,” the opening collage, suffers from the same problem as the acting. Most of the time, when Feore has to give the singers something to do with their bodies, she has them mime the lyrics, which is just a form of doubling down. When Sarah and Adelaide in “Marry the Man Today” list all the ways in which they might conspire to keep their men, Sky and Nathan, from straying, we don’t need Sinclair-Brisbane to indicate an expanding stomach on “Have a baby”: we know how pregnancy works. Sometimes the gestures don’t even match the words. “I may be down / But I’m not flat as all that” in “Take Back Your Mink” means that the singers (Adelaide and her Hot Box Girls) aren’t desperate enough to hang on to the fancy clothes their swains have bought them if it means surrendering their virtue (the joke, of course, is that the number is a striptease). It’s not a comment on the size of their breasts. In “The Oldest Established,” when Nathan, Benny and Nicely-Nicely run through Nathan’s failed attempts to find a location for his floating crap game, Benny answers Nicely-Nicely’s “There’s the stock room behind McCloskey’s Bar” with “But Mrs. McCloskey ain’t a good scout,” which means, presumably, that she’s not on board with the idea of renting it out to crapshooters. In this show, Benny mimes her throwing back a few shots. They can’t use the stock room because its owner’s wife is a drunk? Come again?

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.