The ‘Glee’ star steps triumphantly into the function of Fanny Brice within the Broadway musical revival that proved a poor match for Beanie Feldstein.
It’s not usually that a main Broadway musical lands its very best lead six months after starting performances and opening to combined evaluations. Then once more, it’s an anomaly that a star with the credentials of Lea Michele would conform to step in as a alternative lead. However Michele’s tenacious willpower to check her abilities as Fanny Brice, a job she clearly considers the a part of a lifetime, places her in unusual territory.
To get the headline information out of the best way first, Michele provides a sensational efficiency in Humorous Lady. Whereas her predecessor within the Broadway revival, Beanie Feldstein, was a sweetly charming presence who leaned arduous on the comedy, her gentle, nice singing voice put her out of her depth with numbers that referred to as for supple modulation and commanding energy.
Maybe much more crucially, the starvation that defines early twentieth century stage star Brice within the fictionalized 1964 bio-musical — for each skilled success and private success in a rocky marriage to inveterate gambler Nick Arnstein — was barely there in Feldstein’s winsome characterization.
Michele has the vocal expertise and the starvation. The actress has been unofficially auditioning for the function since her first season as Rachel Berry on Glee, making clear her character’s obsession each with the function and with the unique star it was formed round on Broadway and within the 1968 display screen model, Barbra Streisand.
At varied factors over 5 seasons, Rachel carried out a string of numbers from the present, “Individuals,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “I’m the Best Star,” “Who Are You Now?” and the duet, “You Are Lady, I Am Man,” in addition to the Brice trademark music “My Man,” which was added for Streisand as a closing quantity within the William Wyler movie.
Michele additionally carried out “Don’t Rain on My Parade” on the 2010 Tony Awards telecast, all however begging the trade crowd within the Radio Metropolis Music Corridor viewers to place her on a Broadway stage within the function.
Early talks for Michele to guide a Ryan Murphy-produced revival fell aside, and her probability to sort out Fanny Brice appeared to cross her by. The ship actually appeared to have sailed as soon as Michele grew to become a social media pariah after accounts of her alleged bullying of castmates on Glee and different productions started circulating.
Humility is just not a requirement when taking part in the lead in Humorous Lady, however to this critic, there appears a quiet undertone of contrition in Michele’s riveting efficiency — of honest gratitude to be again on Broadway for the primary time in 14 years, and in her dream function no much less. This half is not only the success of a longtime want, it’s additionally a profession rehabilitation challenge. Although if the ecstatic squeals of followers that greet each huge brassy belt and key change in her songs are any indication, these rumors of unhealthy habits have been forgiven and forgotten.
Reuniting with Michael Mayer, who directed Michele in her breakthrough function in Spring Awakening, the star’s voice has by no means sounded higher. There’s a brand new maturity and texture in her vocals, coating Jule Styne’s melodies in liquid velvet and even bringing a semblance of depth to Bob Merrill’s lyrics, that are seldom greater than serviceable.
Comedy is just not Michele’s pure area, however she throws herself into Brice’s shtick with gusto. That’s notable in her eagerness bordering on desperation as she seizes her tenuous foothold in an trade that expects refrain women to be willowy beauties, and in her sheer chutzpah as she clowns her means out of the refrain to turn into a Ziegfeld Follies star who shapes her personal materials. And she or he will get laughs in her self-deprecating response to Nick’s suave seduction in a Baltimore restaurant.
Key holdovers within the solid — Ramin Karimloo as Nick, Jared Grimes as Fanny’s choreographer buddy Eddie Ryan, and Peter Francis James as Florenz Ziegfeld — match seamlessly with the alternative star. And fellow newcomer Tovah Feldshuh is a delight, changing Jane Lynch as Fanny’s feisty mom, a Brooklyn saloonkeeper with infallible instincts about life and love and showbiz.
Feldshuh is a tiny dynamo within the function, cracking smart and silencing her gossipy Henry Avenue cronies with simply an acerbic phrase or two. It doesn’t appear an idle boast when she sings of Fanny’s comedian timing, “Who Taught Her All the pieces She Is aware of?” However she’s additionally a rock to her daughter, providing unstinting help even when others doubt her.
None of this, alas, could make Humorous Lady an incredible present. Isobel Lennart’s plodding e-book, even with questionable revisions by Harvey Fierstein, ensures that the musical will all the time be a second-rate automobile that’s salvageable solely with a first-rate star. Wyler’s film shrewdly minimized the fabric’s weaknesses by excising disposable numbers and contouring the story to showcase Streisand’s abilities.
On stage, the musical ambles alongside over two-and-a-half hours with scene after scene that begs to be trimmed, and a minimum of a number of songs that might be dropped with no important loss. Having twin cannons hearth confetti over the viewers on the finish of the second-act navy manufacturing quantity, “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” doesn’t make it much less of a dud.
Any manufacturing of Humorous Lady now suffers from the clichés of a narrative that offers an excessive amount of time and a spotlight to dreary Nick and his emotions of emasculation in a wedding the place he’s out-earned by his spouse and left to flounder in his personal shady enterprise ventures.
It’s a credit score to Michele that she finds the pathos within the inevitable finish of that union, clinging tight to the phantasm of unbreakable love in an exquisitely sung “The Music That Makes Me Dance” after which choosing up the items with bittersweet resolve in an affecting reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”
Possibly it’s the years of disappointment and frustration Michele skilled whereas wanting this function so badly and watching it seem to slide by means of her fingers. However her fierce ardour for it, her relentless drive, coupled along with her pure charisma and expertise, make her as dazzling a lead as any revival of this creaky present might hope to seek out. To borrow the phrases Fanny speaks to her dressing room mirror: “Whats up, attractive,” certainly.