Personally, I Loved the ‘Funny Girl’ Revival

There’s a scene in one of my favorite bad/fantastic movies, Beaches (1989), where Bette Midler’s budding theater actress CC Bloom awaits her fate. She’s just performed a small, black box-style avant-garde play that is nebulously about the American worker (“Oh Industry,” anyone?), and is sipping Champagne at the afterparty when a crew member bursts in with a stack of newspapers and a declaration: “Okay everybody, this is it!” Someone reads a favorable Village Voice review. Then: “The Times!” exclaims John Heard, playing CC’s director-boyfriend, John Pierce. “The Times says CC Bloom’s performance is both promising and purposeful.” That cements it: The play is a success, because the critics deemed it so.

The media landscape has changed drastically in the 33 years since Beaches became an instant, watch-it-on-VHS-at-every-sleepover classic, but strangely enough, this particular tradition has not: the voices of a few, almighty, not-exactly-diverse theater critics delivering a decision on which shows are, and aren’t, worthy. It happened just this week, when a rash of reviews all but panned the buzzy, long-awaited Broadway revival of Funny Girl, starring Beanie Feldstein as zany Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice. Many critics found the Booksmart and American Crime Story star likable herself, but lacking in vocal virtuosity. This is fine, fair criticism on its face, but it certainly didn’t help that Feldstein was being measured against veritable icon Barbra Streisand, who originated the role of Brice on Broadway in 1964 and played her in the 1968 Funny Girl film; nor that it had taken almost 60 years to mount a revival. With stakes that high, I have to wonder if anyone, in any new production, would have won raves.

In any case, the reviews seemed to be widely and swiftly accepted as fact, which I struggled to reconcile with the fact that they didn’t align at all with the jubilant experience I had—and much of the audience seemed to have—when I saw Funny Girl myself a few Fridays ago. The show I watched in previews was vivacious and delightfully glitzy, all bright lights and dazzling tap numbers and dancing human flowers. I wasn’t much distracted by Feldstein’s voice, maybe because her bumbling, breezily hysterical Fanny had me at “Hello, gorgeous.” Feldstein is more than just likable; she’s wildly endearing in her portrayal of an unlikely star in a crush of bland, leggy chorus girls—“a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls,” as Brice famously says—stubbornly insisting her way to fame. Feldstein’s sublime confidence, even in the long, never-rending shadow of Streisand, felt triumphant, onstage and off. I hope the reviews don’t change that. Her ability to match wits with the intensely dreamy (even from the mezzanine) Ramin Karimloo, playing the infamous Nick Arnstein, was no small task. In the role of Fanny’s all-knowing mom, Jane Lynch Jane-Lynched to perfection; and when Jared Grimes, as choreographer Eddie Ryan, began to tap dance, the crowd wooed like they were at a Justin Bieber concert. I honestly cried a little.

Many reviewers—undoubtedly distinguished drama experts, all—saw flaws I simply didn’t as an audience member, even one who’s been a lover of Broadway since my first show at age five (Starlight Express, which I remember only for its flashing lights and frenetic rollerskating). They called out the pared-down cast and the number of violins used for “People.” More than one fact-checked Funny Girl against the real Brice’s life story, noting that her family wasn’t actually working class; that Brice had been married before Arnstein; and that Arnstein was just a crook, minus the heart-of-gold qualifier. Tonally, this felt ridiculously persnickety: Since when is Broadway bound to historical accuracy? I don’t think Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton cited Jay-Z in cabinet-room rap battles, either. Personally, I didn’t care at all about artistic liberties; I was too busy feeling the fizzing joy rippling through the August Wilson Theatre during “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat.”