My Variety Review: 'Funny Girl' Returns To Broadway

“You ever feel like there’s someone watching from the shadows?” asks Beanie Feldstein’s Fanny Brice, as haunting apparitions from the Ziegfeld star’s past waft in and out in a kind of “Fanny’s ‘Follies’.”

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.

The script, revised by Harvey Fierstein for this production, still fails to come to terms to any great degree with the disconnect in the relationship of Fanny and gambler husband Nicky Arnstein, effortlessly played and stunningly sung by Ramin Karimloo. What a 2022 audience may find exasperating is the unresolved dichotomy of its leading character. Fanny is clearly no push-over, one who is so confident and determined that — hell, she starts out by singing “I’m the Greatest Star,” so clearly self-esteem is not in doubt.

Yet Fanny is also a fool for love, or at least an unexplored, unjustified and unbelievable fool. Yes, she is insecure about her looks and class but she’s also a person of power and she doesn’t hesitate to use it, even on the intimidating theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.

But her character — and Feldstein’s performance — never goes far beyond the sentimental, tiresome and not-exactly-of-the-moment cliche of the woman who can’t stop loving her man, even…|CONTINUED|