The news that Sheridan Smith is to star in the title role of classic musical FUNNY GIRL at the Menier Chocolate Factory (an Off-West End venue near London Bridge that’s proved something of a West End and Broadway hit factory) is significant.
The prospect of eclipsing the memory of mega-star Barbara Streisand, the show’s original leading lady, has remained a daunting one and no star has previously been found around which to base a London revival. It’s fantastic that it’s to be both a Brit and one as talented and much loved as Smith.
The main events in FUNNY GIRL, set in the early 1900s, recall the Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice’s early ambitions, her rise to fame, friendships and her obsessive love for the charming Nick Arnstein, despite his failed & crooked business ventures.
The intensity of Brice’s feelings are demonstrated in two extraordinary songs that will long endure as classics of Musical Theatre. In the song PEOPLE Brice reveals her loneliness and yearning for normality whilst DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE is as stirring an anthem to independence as you’re ever likely to hear in a show.
This musical’s history is a fascinating one. The journey from conception to its original opening night was almost as eventful as the rise from rags to riches it depicts.
A film producer, Ben Stark, had a collection of taped interviews with his mother-in-law, Brice.
At first he commissioned a book adaptation that he then reportedly paid $50,000 to have withdrawn from sale. Next a long line of Hollywood script writers failed to shape the material into a biographical film. Eventually Julie Styne was signed up as composer, Bob Merrill as lyricist and Jerome Robbins as director for a stage version but they had no star. Luckily Robbins knew of Barbra Streisand’s work from her first hit show, I CAN GET IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE, but he too walked off the project until final previews.
Even with a creative team and the perfect star in place the show massively over ran at its first out of town try out and the Broadway opening night was postponed five times whipping the theatre community into a fever of anticipation. The TV show SMASH is based on these events.
Unusually for such a troubled show it triumphed and would run for nearly three years. Streisand reprised her role in the West End revival of 1966 and went on to star in the 1968 film which was similarly bighted by artistic wrangling, walk outs and stand-offs.
Although the show was a critical triumph for Streisand the fates were unkind when it came to awards.
In most Broadway seasons a show as well received and popular as FUNNY GIRL could have expected to sweep the board at the Tony Awards but in 1964 there was stiff competition from HELLO DOLLY and FUNNY GIRL lost out. (Similarly although Streisand won an Oscar for the film, competition was so great that she had to share it with Katherine Hepburn, recognised for her performance in THE LION IN WINTER, and in the Best Picture category the musical was beaten by OLIVER!)
Let’s hope this first revival will win the theatre awards the original production and Streisand missed out on and be an easier journey for all concerned. what ever happens I can't wait to hear Smith belt out those amazing songs.
The Michael Grandage Company has finally announced the full casting for the upcoming production of Anna Ziegler’s play, Photograph 51 at the Noel Coward Theatre.