“Funny Girl” takes its parade and an astounding new Fanny Brice on tour

Newcomer Katerina McCrimmon is poised to be the greatest star

Is there any Broadway show that carries as much baggage for its leading lady as Funny Girl?

It took over 50 years for a revival to get to New York, in part because the role of Fanny Brice is so synonymous with the woman it was written for and built around — the singular Barbra Streisand. In 2022, it finally returned to Broadway and stuttered with Beanie Feldstein as its leading lady until a messy turn of events led to Lea Michele swooping in to save box office returns.

But I’m happy to report that the touring revival of that production is an opportunity to leave all that offstage drama squarely in the past, and say “hello, gorgeous” to a riveting musical with a showstopping leading lady.

Funny Girl tells the story of Fanny Brice (Katerina McCrimmon), the legendary performer and comic who rose to fame at the turn-of-the-century as a star in the Ziegfeld Follies. It follows Fanny from her early days, dreaming of her big break, to her stardom, but it is constructed around her romance with gambler Nick Arnstein (Stephen Mark Lukas).

The show lives and dies by the actress at its center, and filling the shoes of Barbra Streisand is no small order. Lucky for us, Katerina McCrimmon might just be the next greatest star. Fanny requires her own brand of triple threat — a singer who can belt like nobody’s business, but who is equally adept as a comic and dramatic actress. McCrimmon not only fits the bill, she exceeds it. Her Fanny is a brash dreamer when we first meet her, mugging for her audiences and using her sense of humor to cover her own insecurities.

We watch her mature in real time, as she meets and falls in love with Nick, a guy who dazzles with his ruffled shirt but has heartbreak written all over him. McCrimmon plays her love scenes with a dizzying blend of horny chutzpah and genuine romantic feeling. She brings the audience in on Fanny’s wonderment at Nick’s attentions, then turns our laughs to a swoon. Her ability to ping between those two extremes is executed as nimbly as one of Fanny’s pals, Eddie Ryan’s (Izaiah Montaque Harris) tap routines.

On stage, Fanny is a powerhouse, but in her personal life, she’s a hothouse flower who blooms under Nick’s attention — and McCrimmon blends these two aspects of Fanny’s public and private life with grace. She’s equally adept at making us laugh and cry.

But her true power is in her once-in-a-generation voice. The vocal potency of McCrimmon’s belt whips the audience into a downright frenzy. When she opens her broad mouth on classics like “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade," a tidal wave of sound emerges to drown the audience with its aural richness and force. But the real magic of her voice isn’t merely that it’s arresting or dynamic, it’s the ways in which she threads the emotion of the material through her astounding instrument to pack a wallop that will leave a mark for days.

It must be said that Funny Girl is still not a perfect show by any stretch of the imagination. Despite being a charming rogue, Nick Arnstein is a dull character, and it's a role that requires the sheer magnetism of someone like the film’s Omar Sharif to make Nick’s appeal evident. Lukas makes an admirable effort, and he’s easy on the eyes, but there’s just not much there to work with. At least he has an easy chemistry with McCrimmon. But if you cut both of Nick’s songs from Act II, it would not matter.

Indeed, the musical’s Achilles heel is its second act. Harvey Fierstein has given revising Isobel Lennart’s book the old college try, but there’s only so much to salvage in the muddled back-half of the show. Thankfully, the finale still lands thanks to McCrimmon's one-two punch of closing musical numbers, but most of the rest of it is forgettable — and it’s a problem that has plagued Funny Girl since it first opened. It plays better on screen where it can zip by in a cinematic third act, rather than having to sustain the weight of the second half of a stage musical.

The show in its totality is a love letter to the big, old-fashioned Broadway musical. David Zinn’s set design, all framed with a flashy vaudeville-esque proscenium arch, is a grand playing field, even if the staging does push the action into strangely tight spaces and leaves too much empty space. Susan Hilferty’s costumes are that of Broadway dreams, as glitzy and eye-catching as the Follies were at the height of their glory.

Melissa Manchester is a stand-out as Mrs. Brice, Fanny’s mother, and she wisely avoids the pitfall of making a caricature of the “Jewish mother” while still finding plenty of opportunities for wise-cracking. The ensemble provides a dazzling backdrop to the action.

But much of that is tertiary when the show so fully belongs to its titular heroine — and what a gift it is to have an actress of McCrimmon’s talents in the role. It’s easy to forget and forgive the musical’s faults when McCrimmon commands the stage so completely. In her hands, its story of one woman’s resilience and heartbreak is devastating and inspiring all at once.

Funny Girl has always charmed me, but it has never deeply moved me. Until now. McCrimmon made me weep to the point that I was still furiously swiping away tears for several minutes after the curtain call. People who get to see McCrimmon’s star-making performance, now, they are the luckiest people in the world. Grade: A-

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.