The Reviews Are In – Is Beanie Feldstein Up to 'Funny Girl's' Demands?

It has taken nearly 60 years for "Funny Girl" to return to Broadway. The musical that thrust a 21-year-old Barbra Streisand to stardom and ran some 1,348 performances in the mid 1960s is one of the few long-running classics not to have been revived...until now. On Sunday night, its long-awaited revival took place at the August Wilson Theatre with Beanie Feldstein ("Booksmart," "American Crime Story: Impeachment") starring as Fanny Brice in the musical depiction of her rise to fame and difficult personal life. The opening coincided with Streisand's 80th birthday.

Streisand went on to win an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the 1968 film version; but the vehicle itself has largely been ignored. There was a planned revival in 2012 with Lauren Ambrose ("Six Feet Under," "My Fair Lady" on Broadway) as Brice, but it fell through. The famous score, which includes "People" and "Don't Rain on My Parade," has music by Jule Style and lyrics by Bob Merrill. The original production was supervised by Jerome Robbins, who came in during its troubled tryout run and took over direction from the credited Garson Kanin. The book – long thought the source of the show's problems – was by Isobel Lennart. For the revival, Harvey Fierstein did a rewrite and included songs cut from the original, including the title song that appears in the film.

The current revival is directed by Michael Mayer, with company choreography by Ellenore Scott and tap choreography by Ayodele Casel. The cast features Ramin Karimloo as Nick Arnstein, Jane Lynch as Fanny's mother, and Jared Grimes as Eddie, Fanny's bff.

The reviews are in. Is Feldstein worthy? Here is a sample:

At the Daily Beast, Tim Teeman writes in his downbeat review: "Without a tangible relationship between Feldstein's Fanny and Karimloo's Nick, the show listlessly orbits the general idea of them not being such a great pairing for over two and a half hours... Feldstein seems too much of a junior partner to Karimloo–a sassy ingenue rather than wry diva. Streisand is obviously an intimidating shadow to operate under, and comparisons are unfair but inevitable given the iconic nature of the role and its foundational star. Feldstein's singing matches her incarnation of Brice, in being questioning, tentative, and wide-eyed. She nails the big songs but more restrainedly than many might expect. The numbers need more. She does not have the voice for this."

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney had mixed feelings about Feldstein. "Feldstein has emerged as an irresistible screen presence in films like Booksmart and Lady Bird, and she was a delight in the supporting role of Minnie Fay in 2017's blockbuster Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler. But she has a lovely, light singing voice in a part that often calls for big-belt power, and she reads girlish, never quite selling the consuming hunger that propels Fanny to stardom in the early-1920s Ziegfeld Follies. Feldstein leans hard on the comedy with enormous charm, but she struggles to locate the raw vulnerability of Fanny in later years, as her marriage to inveterate gambler Nick Arnstein (Ramin Karimloo) falls apart."

In a harsh review at the New York Post, Johnny Oleksinski leads with: "The audience members at "Funny Girl" are not the luckiest people in the world." Adding that what they "are finally laying their eyes on isn't particularly funny, or well sung, or well designed or well directed. This sorely lacking new production rains on the old musical's parade."

As for Feldstein: "She is supposed to steal our hearts and sprain our funny bones. No dice... Feldstein, however, barely muddles through the beloved songs. The best performed numbers ("Sadie, Sadie") are merely capable; the worst ("People") are awkward letdowns. In the spoken scenes, the jokes are pushed harder than a broken-down Hummer on a highway and few of them earn more than polite giggles. Feldstein is, I'm sorry to say, not giving a Broadway-caliber performance."

Jesse Green in the New York Times cuts to chase: "To rip the bandage off quickly: Feldstein is not stupendous. She's good. 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. 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. But working hard at what should be naturally extraordinary is not in Fanny's DNA."

He also lays the show's major problems on its book: "Tracing Brice's rise from gawky waif to Ziegfeld star between 1910 and 1927, 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."

He continues to say that if the show had enough entertainment value, it might have been better; "it might prove irresistible. 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. (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."

In one of two reviews in the Observer, David Cote writes: "A star is not yet born in the revival of 'Funny Girl.' Beanie Feldstein is just a gleam in her producer's eye. It's a charming gleam, possibly a lucrative glint, but not the sunburst of ambition and verve the actress playing Fanny Brice requires to transform this 1964 backstage musical with a gorgeous score and a so-so book into a vehicle for voracious, unstoppable talent...

"Feldstein comes across as too sensible, too sane, too body positive to incarnate the cauldron of self-mocking, self-aggrandizing, and self-doubt that drives Fanny to success in the Ziegfeld Follies and then into the arms of handsome Nicky Arnstein (Ramin Karimloo, suavely solid)... She has a thin, nasally voice that no amount of manipulation by sound designer Brian Ronan can coax into sonic depth. I don't mean that Feldstein sings badly–she can belt a button or smolder in the gentler numbers–but she doesn't let the music flow through her or show lyrics popping into her head."

On the other hand, for Cote's Observer colleague Rex Reed Feldstein is a revelation. Opening his review with commentary about how he felt some roles could never equal their original performances, such as Streisand. "Then I saw an actor with the unlikely name of Beanie Feldstein in the sparkling and explosively entertaining new Broadway production of 'Funny Girl' and the one transformed is me," Reed writes.

"I've heard applause before, but not as loud or as often as the end of every song Beanie Feldstein sings in Funny Girl. Not, in other words, since Barbra Streisand launched the role in 1964 that led to more star-spangled fame, fortune and awards than anyone remembers. Move over, Barbra. Welcome, Beanie. A new star is born."

While adding that Feldstein doesn't sing like Streisand, he says she adds something new: "But she does have one thing her legendary predecessor in the role did not have–a sweet, warm truthfulness that makes her more accessible. She's familiar, comfortable in her skin, like an old friend. You're wary and cautious at first, but she grows on you, like a lichen. By the time the intermission seamlessly arrives, you're in love."

He adds, praising Feldstein's co-star Ramin Karimloo: "The show is three hours long, but Ms. Feldstein makes the minutes fly by with such pleasure that you wish it would never end. And she is bolstered every step of the way by the first completely drop-dead lover-husband version of gambler-racketeer Nick Arnstein in the history of 'Funny Girl.' The dashing, glamorous Ramin Karimloo, so wonderful in 'Anastasia,' is also the first Nick who can sing, dance and render an audience stricken with such awe that new numbers had to be added to enhance his role and showcase his varied talents appropriately. He makes Fanny's fairy tale romanticism breathe with the realism that all things are possible. If this isn't a star in the making, then justice no longer exists in the American theater."

But Variety's Frank Rizzo was harsher: "The problem with this uninspired revival of "Funny Girl" – which opened at the August Wilson Theatre on Sunday, marking the show's Broadway return after nearly 60 years – is not simply the singular ghost of she who shall not be named. (Alright: It's Barbra Steisand.) Rather, the issue here is the production's inability to live up to its star-making potential that would have made us once again forgive the simplistic, sentimental and sanitized original book credited to Isobel Lennart."

Of Feldstein, he writes: "Feldstein's Fanny is a wide-eyed woman-child, at turns stubborn, awkward and silly. Knowingly precocious, Feldstein relies on broad face-making rather than a more nuanced comic skillset. Yes, though Brice herself could be soulful in song, she was not the subtlest performer either – one of Fanny's trademark comic characters, after all, was Baby Snooks. But that doesn't mean this bio-show has to reflect a child's version of adulthood."

Peter Marks writing in the Washington Post was equally measured. "It has taken guts for Feldstein to step into those proverbial shoes and sing and dance in them onstage at the August Wilson Theatre, where director Michael Mayer's splashy Broadway revival, the first, had its official opening Sunday night. (On Streisand's 80th birthday, no less.) One admires the pluck – an essential attribute when playing a character whose introductory number is titled 'I'm the Greatest Star.' Rather than incandescent, though, Feldstein's star turn is an earthbound achievement, best when she's executing the comedy aspect of musical comedy, and less compelling at the music part. A better fit was her Minnie Fay in the 'Hello, Dolly!' revival that starred Bette Midler."

Adding that she is not bad by any measure. "Her vocal skills are adequate. In a workmanlike vehicle built as a galvanizing showcase for its title character, though, you want to be taken for a ride that leaves you dizzy with the acceleration of such songs as 'People' and 'Don't Rain on My Parade.' That's simply the expectation 'Funny Girl' sets up, and it's also simply the case that, no matter how ardently we root for the endearing Feldstein – and we certainly do – that ignition never fully occurs."
He continues: "So maybe, if you can lower your sights, you'll find Mayer's 'Funny Girl' to be a pleasant diversion, an entertaining throwback to the heyday of musicals with lavish sets and costumes and show tunes that Mom and Dad (or Grandma and Granddad) cued up nightly on the stereo. This production accomplishes that, with the input of actors including Jane Lynch, a thoroughgoing delight as Brice's mother – I'm coming to the conclusion that there's nothing Lynch can't do – and Jared Grimes as a tap-dancing whiz and Brice's impossibly faithful friend, Eddie."

And, like most of the others, found charm in Karimloo. "Speaking of impossible, Ramin Karimloo is on hand as Nicky Arnstein, the dreamboat who knocks Brice's bloomers off. In Harvey Fierstein's new revisions of Isobel Lennart's original book for the show, Karimloo gets more to do, especially in applying his velvety baritone to added songs in a Jule Styne-Bob Merrill score – a song list that varies significantly from the 1968 movie. Arnstein, a poker player by trade, here gets his own socko second-act solo, the new "Temporary Arrangement," that's staged like a number out of "Guys and Dolls," with a chorus of dancing gangsters."

At Vulture, Helen Shaw was also reserved in her praise. In assessing Feldstein, she writes: "She's winningly fresh; she gives great "bumble;" she has beautiful eyes the size of hubcaps, which roll and twinkle and flirt... But in song after song, Feldstein's voice lets her down. Piercing and unpleasant when it gets any higher than her chest, fading and pitchy when it descends even a few steps, it's simply not a sound you expect to hear on Broadway. Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill wrote some stunners for Funny Girl, including "People" and "Don't Rain on my Parade." The latter song sits in Feldstein's narrow comfort range, and so she blasts it out – particularly its final note – with foghorn force (if not phrasing). Everything else, though, goes sour."

She does, nonetheless, find much to like in Karimloo. "It's lucky, therefore, that Karimloo brings a honeyed voice and such capacity to his part. His Nick is a sexpot (not to spoil anything, but he did pioneer the shirtless Valjean moment in Les Misérables), a clown (during a very silly seduction scene, he bounces from the floor to a chaise while remaining perfectly horizontal), a charming addict, a secret boor, and, in a superb final moment, a broken man. Jane Lynch flutters at him, as do all the busybody noodges down in Brooklyn (Toni DiBuono is a particularly good Mrs. Strakosh), and his sweetness with them and with Fanny carries a great deal of the first act. He and Feldstein make their early romance flicker with humor and heat – her zany awkwardness makes him feel awkward, which, for a smoothie like Nick Arnstein, must feel like getting hit by a bus. Feldstein seems flummoxed by the transition to more adult scenes in part two, however, and Karimloo winds up playing those almost as if he's alone."