Theater review: Lively ‘Funny Girl’ brings Fanny Brice’s story to life with great singing, dancing

What does “Funny Girl” feel like in the 21st century? Even when the show premiered in the 1960s, people associated it more with its star, Barbra Streisand, than Fanny Brice, the real-life stage and radio superstar who it is actually about.

Playing at The Bushnell through Sunday, “Funny Girl” is constrained by some old-world values and old Broadway tropes, but the impetuous spirit of Brice and some of the most stirring showtunes of the ’60s shine through.

Brice was associated with some true pop standards, including “My Man” and “Secondhand Rose,” but “Funny Girl” is not a jukebox musical and those songs are not in it. Instead, composer Jule Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill created their own classics: “People,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “Who Are You Now?” and “What Do Happy People Do?”

CT holds special spot in heart of ‘Funny Girl’ star performing this week at The Bushnell

The show fixates on Brice’s time with her second husband Nicky Arnstein, to the extent that it acts as if she never had a first husband. (Her third husband, Connecticut island-owning songwriter/producer Billy Rose, was the subject of Streisand’s movie sequel to “Funny Girl” called “Funny Lady.”) Arnstein was a high-rolling gambler and con man. “Funny Girl” lightens his most illegal activities to make it seem like his main problem is a stubborn chauvinist insistence on making his own money and making his own decisions so as not to be branded “Mr. Brice.”

The show also gives the impression that Brice was the one key star of the Ziegfeld Follies. Florenz Ziegfeld’s first appearance in the show is as a disembodied voice who’s likened to God, a la the director in “A Chorus Line,” but after a while this revered Broadway producer is wandering in and out of Brice’s dressing room (even when she’s on tour) as if he’s her manager or some underling.

It’s a weird way to portray one of the most powerful theater figures of his time, and equally weird that Brice never even mentions such other superstar Ziegfeld Follies acts as W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, Eddie Cantor, Josephine Baker and Sophie Tucker. Heck, there’s even another Follies star who got a Broadway musical made about them, Will Rogers. So much for context.

“Funny Girl” wants to be an intimate relationship drama, not a historical vaudeville pageant. This revival, despite some big rewrites by Harvey Fierstein, is still stuck around the sort of romantic cliches and hoary old body-image issues that most Broadway musicals strenuously avoid these days. Brice feels she is too unattractive to be loved by someone as dashing as Arnstein and goes through a lot of emotional abuse because of it. Scene after scene, not to mention the show’s title, continually makes the strained and distasteful point that it’s a good thing Brice is funny because she’s certainly not pretty. There are several songs that underscore this, plus the gender-typing male power tune “You Are Woman, I Am Man.” It gets really hard to take after a while.

Given that this revival was defined on Broadway by two well-known movie or TV stars — first Beanie Feldstein, then Lea Michelle — the producers made the interesting choice of getting a virtual unknown to star as Brice in the first national tour. Katerina McCrimmon, who appeared in a minor role in “Ah, Wilderness!” at Hartford Stage in 2021, has a sparse resume with no Broadway credits, but she turns out to be exactly the type of brash, hungry young performer with something to prove that a show like this needs. It’s also a chance to see “Funny Girl” and think about Brice rather than Streisand or Feldstein or Michelle instead. There’s no distraction, just the story and songs.

McCrimmon fits the role. She also sings like a dream, nailing the all-important “People” as well as the emotionally intense closing numbers of both acts. She’s as funny as the musical’s title demands, yet also sweet and vulnerable. When she’s leading a full-cast Follies spectacle involving wedding dresses or army uniforms, McCrimmon is truly the most riveting figure on the stage.

The tour does have a big-name star in it, Melissa Manchester, who has considerable stage experience but is still best known for her hits “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” “You Should Hear How She Talks About You” and “Midnight Blue.” But Manchester is relegated to a stereotypical comic Jewish mother role in which she only has a few songs. Because of her over-the-top accent, she doesn’t even get to sing those songs in her own glorious voice.

As Arnstein, Stephen Mark Lucas is an OK cad but has nothing near McCrimmon’s charisma and it’s often hard to see what Brice sees in this nudgy and annoying man. Lucas is best when he turns the character into a lounge lizard caricature, as in a hilarious seduction scene in a fancy hotel room.

There’s another key role in “Funny Girl”: Eddie Ryan, Fanny’s childhood friend and theatrical mentor whose unrequited love for her is another of the show’s sad romantic subplots. Izaiah Montaque Harris brings great energy to the role, and this dance-driven production gives him a showcase for his impressive tap dancing skills.

The “Funny Girl” tour behaves like a production from the Goodspeed Opera House. There’s an eerie similarity to Brice’s big final number in this show and what Judy McLane did with “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” at the Goodspeed last year. This show also bears a strong resemblance to the Goodspeed’s stripped-down “42nd Street” a couple of years ago. If you liked those, you’ll feel very comfortable here.

“Funny Girl” is lithe and colorful and old-fashioned and tightly contained. Settings are suggested by a few quickly shifted items, like a trashcan and a streetlight for a late-night street corner romantic scene. There’s little of the high-tech wrap-around projections that have distinguished many of the Broadway tours at The Bushnell this year. “Funny Girl” is set in the world of vaudeville in the 1920s, and acts like it, even placing footlights at the front of the stage and using backdrops of old Ziegfeld Follies posters. It doesn’t clutter up the stage, allowing more room for wild, unrestrained dancing.

The dancing, in fact, is this show’s biggest unexpected pleasure. There are big full-cast dance numbers with everyone kicking high and waving their arms wide. Just as importantly, every time a dance move can be inserted into the show, whether by a waiter delivering drinks or passers-by at a train station, it’s done with a grand flourish. The showy choreography of Ellenore Scott, with a separate credit for tap choreography from Ayodele Casel, enlivens the show at every exaggerated turn.

Sometimes Michael Mayer’s stage direction is too crisp and emphatic for its own good. Quite a few folks started dashing down the aisle to the restrooms on Tuesday night when the black-out ending of one striking scene led them to believe that intermission had arrived. Here’s a helpful warning that the first act isn’t over until Fanny sings “Don’t Rain on Parade.”

Re-experiencing “Funny Girl” isn’t all fun, due to that incessant sexism and the central argument that a married couple can’t both have careers. But this production extols Fanny Brice’s comic artistry, provides soaring renditions of Jule Styne standards and brings in plenty of fresh kicks with that sprightly choreography. The adjectives don’t end with “Funny.”

“Funny Girl,” with music by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and a book by Isobel Lennart updated by Harvey Fierstein, runs through June 23 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. The remaining shows are Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. $38-$148. bushnell.org.