NEW YORK — Come Tony Awards time next spring, the committee is going to have an issue. Lea Michele’s show-stopping lead performance in director Michael Mayer’s revival of “Funny Girl” will be a formidable competitor for best lead performance by an actress in a musical. But since she’s technically (and famously) a replacement for Beanie Feldstein in that same role, she won’t be eligible.
It’s hard to think of a comparable situation in recent Broadway history, especially when you couple Michele’s rapturously received take on Fanny Brice with the arrival of Tovah Feldshuh, in the role of her mother. The veteran Feldshuh, who fits this role with the ease of the subway sliding into Brooklyn, is also a replacement, in this case for Jane Lynch, who is a fine comic performer but never looked comfortable as Fanny’s mom/enabler.
It’s as if the show finally got the casting right, but not before all kinds of Feldstein mishegoss and a social media drama that, fun as it was for Broadway and “Funny Girl” obsessives and maybe even good for the box office, surely came with some collateral damage for the humans involved. In this story, Feldstein took on a role not unlike Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Instead of Megxit, a phenom born of both ambition and pain, we had Feldstein’s bye-bye, moved up some to protect her dignity in the face of the inevitable comparison surely coming to rain on her parade. People, she discovered, need people. Until they don’t.
I liked Feldstein, if I may, more than most. She bought all she had all the way down to her toes, even if she could not adequately sing the part. I found the effort, and the vulnerability of her flailing Fanny, to be very poignant. When the character explained why she still loves her handsome loser of a husband, as played opposite both actresses by the eroticized Ramin Karimloo, noting that no one else could adequately understand what he did for her, you knew immediately what she meant by the “what.”
That’s gone now, but Michele can sing this role (forever associated with Barbra Streisand, of course), with polished, bravura aplomb. Jule Styne’s notes rest easy in her instrument and she finds all kinds of honest, kinetic variance. And in terms of the scenes, she is very much in sync with what you might call the dry-witted Harvey Fierstein aesthetic. I suspect the book reviser had her at least partially in his head when he set to work. Not to mention Feldshuh.
But what will impress the audience the most will be Michele’s acting chops. She’s very touching as her Fanny gets trapped in the net with that same handsome loser and you get the sense, as a young star who has been through the wringers of Twitter and its snap-judgement squeeze, that Michele now knows full well how fame and fortune ain’t ever all fun, not least because men usually can’t easily handle successful women.
You really can’t separate what Michele is doing on the stage of the August Wilson Theatre from the famous history of her wanting the role very, very badly; ergo, her successful rendition comes with a kind of populist poetic justice. But if you heard on the Tony Awards, auditioning for a mass audience, you did not get a read of what she is doing now. Theater is a time-bound industry and this is an actress who clearly has developed a sense of what high stakes in love and professional life can come to mean. Especially when the opportunities for both no longer feel unlimited.
At the matinee I saw, they screamed from the balcony for Michele as I had heard them scream for Feldstein.
Presumably we are talking different audience members, but who knows?
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'FUNNY GIRL'
At the August Wilson Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St., New York; funnygirlonbroadway.com
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