“I thought it was about time, yeah,” Studi, 74, says chuckling.
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But one thing he had never done in a movie is give someone a kiss. For three decades, he has arrestingly crafted wide-ranging portraits of the Native American experience. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.NEW YORK (AP) - In Wes Studi’s potent and pioneering acting career, he has played vengeful warriors, dying prisoners and impassioned resistance leaders. Streisman!įunny Girl At the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan. They don’t grow them that way much, anymore, nor write new material for them. It’s in the personality of the necessary star: someone not nice but inevitable, not diligent but explosive, not well-rounded but weird. This could all have been predicted over the years, many revivals have been attempted and defeated because the thing a revival is trying to revive is not to be found in the property itself. (You’re going to sell me “People” with two violins?) Only the aptly gaudy costumes by Susan Hilferty suggest the Ziegfeldian overabundance that shows like “Funny Girl” were designed to purvey. But Mayer’s staging, which at times seems to aim for the ghostly nostalgia of “Follies,” feels lumbering and underfunded, with cheap-looking sets (by David Zinn), a cast of 22 in place of the original 43 and wan new orchestrations for 14 players, based on the glorious originals by Ralph Burns for 25. If the revival actually provided enough of that, it might prove irresistible. “Funny Girl” reaches for the same complexity but most often contents itself, except in its best songs, with mere entertainment. In that show, no song was allowed to serve less than double duty everything pointed back to the plot. This is not a unified work like Styne’s 1959 hit, “Gypsy,” arguably just as fictional in its portrait of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee yet one of the indisputably great musicals. Nor are Fierstein’s anachronisms and vulgar jokes about sex with chorines and men in trench coats catastrophic. That the sequence has little to do with the story is not a deal-breaker in “Funny Girl,” it may even be an advantage. More happily, when Feldstein sings her own version of “Funny Girl” near the end of the show, it’s simple and touching - not overstretched like her merely loud renditions of the big three hits: “I’m the Greatest Star,” “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” A bit later, Nick gets a version of the title song, which though shot for the 1968 film, starring Streisand and Omar Sharif, was cut for good cause. The song “Temporary Arrangement,” in which Nick expresses his mounting fury, has been retrieved from the Styne-Merrill trunk, where it was stashed after one performance in 1964 and should have remained its intensity comes out of nowhere and rips at the show’s thin fabric. Unfortunately the effort is counterproductive. Karimloo also sings beautifully and, to the extent the new book tries to beef up the role, he’s got the beef to do it. That Arnstein wasn’t remotely gorgeous, and Karimloo totally is, we can allow. Yet Brice, knowing all that, still adored him, which makes a far more interesting tale than the bowdlerized one the show offers, of a duped woman finally and regretfully seeing the light. Arnstein did not get involved in illegal activities because he hated being supported by Fanny he was a crook and a jailbird who had been gladly sponging off her from the beginning. The bigger distortions - perhaps necessitated by the fact that Ray Stark, who produced the original, was Brice’s son-in-law - avoid one. Tracing Brice’s rise from gawky waif to Ziegfeld star between 19, along with the corresponding decline of her romance with the “gorgeous” gambler Nick Arnstein (Ramin Karimloo), it bites off more than it can chew and then, at least in Michael Mayer’s production, repeatedly refuses to chew it.īut those distortions at least make a good story. The main elephant is the book, written by Isobel Lennart and fiddled with for this production by Harvey Fierstein, to no avail. Still, you can’t blame Feldstein for the show’s problems that would be like blaming the clown for the elephants. But working hard at what should be naturally extraordinary is not in Fanny’s DNA. Her voice, though solid and sweet and clear, is not well suited to the music, and you feel her working as hard as she can to power through the gap. She’s funny enough in places, and immensely likable always, as was already evident from her performances in the movies “Booksmart” and “Lady Bird” and, on Broadway, in “Hello, Dolly!” You root for her to raise the roof, but she only bumps against it a little.
To rip the bandage off quickly: Feldstein is not stupendous.
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