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.
