Katerina McCrimmon gives the touring performance of this or any year as comedy legend Fanny Brice in the Broadway National Tour of Funny Girl, its songs as unforgettable as ever, its revised Harvey Fierstein book a marked improvement on the Isobel Lennart original, and its direction (by Michael Mayer) as inspired as direction gets.

As any true musical theater aficionado will tell you, 1964’s Funny Girl centers on comedienne Brice’s rise to national stardom and her rocky relationship with entrepreneur/gambler Nicky Arnstein.

Despite admonitions from family and friends against a career in show business (“If a girl isn’t pretty like a Miss Atlantic City, all she gets in life is pity and a pat”), young Fanny truly believes that “I’m The Greatest Star,” and goes on to prove it in production numbers like “Cornet Man,” “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” and “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” ending up a headliner in the world famous Ziegfeld Follies.

Accompanying her on her road to stardom is the tall, dark, and handsome Mr. Arnstein (“I Want To Be Seen With You Tonight”), who finds in Funny Fanny an attraction that simply cannot be denied (“You Are Woman, I Am Man”).

Still, as any country singer will tell you, falling in love with a gambler is risky business, and though it doesn’t bode well for a happily-ever-after ending, it does give Funny Girl one of the greatest torch songs ever in a Broadway musical (“The Music That Makes Me Dance”)—all of these now standards featuring music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill

Fierstein improves upon Lennart’s book by spending less time on on peripheral characters (he savvily cuts the entirely unmissed “Find Yourself A Man”) while beefing up Nick’s role, particularly in allowing us to witness one of his most disastrous business investments through Nick’s own eyes (“Temporary Arrangement,” cut from the original Broadway production) rather than simply from Fanny’s point of view, and we first get to hear the show’s title song (added to the 1967 movie) performed as Nick’s tribute to the “Funny Girl” who has rather improbably won his heart.

Not only does this transform Nick from minor to major player in the musical’s second act, it means that Fanny no longer has to make three or four 11th-hour emotional about-faces in the space of five-or-so minutes.

Director Mayer’s contributions are a major plus as well. (A “Follies”-inspired opening sequence, for one, has Fanny surrounded by ghosts from her theatrical and personal past as does an Act Two “Dream Ballet,” just one of Ellenore Scott’s fabulously choreographed musical numbers.)

And because tap is a dance style uniquely its own, this Funny Girl has not one but two choreographers, with Ayodele Casel’s thrillingly precise, infectiously high-energy tap choreography earning some of the evening’s most enthusiastic cheers, in particular for Izaiah Montaque Harris’s sensational song-and-dance turn as sidekick Eddie, given a whole lot more to do in the revival, and Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat men Lamont Brown and Ryan Lambert.

With his Greek-sculpted body and stunning good looks, Stephen Mark Lukas makes for the most dynamic and charismatic of Nicky Arnsteins (with vocal and acting chops to boot).

Pop icon Melissa Manchester vanishes into Mrs. Brice’s quirky, Jewish-motherly skin (though the role wastes Manchester’s glorious hit-maker pipes) while L.A. theater treasure Eileen T’Kaye and Cindy Chang provide amusing support as Mrs. Brice besties Mrs. Strakosh and Mrs. Meeker.

Walter Coppage is appropriately impressarial as Florenz Ziegfeld. Leah Platt (Emma, Mrs. Nadler), David Foley, Jr, (Tom Keeney), and Jackson Grove (Ziegfeld Tenor) deliver topnotch cameos.

Still, if ever a musical could be said to sink or soar depending on who gets cast in its leading role, Funny Girl is that musical, and relative newcomer McCrimmon delivers a performance that, had she originated it on Broadway, would surely have won her a Best Actress Tony nomination (and probably even the win) for her captivating, touching, outrageously funny, downright phenomenal high-power star turn as Fanny, and if you think no one can rival the role’s originator’s takes on “I’m The Greatest Star,” “People,” “Don’t Rain On My Parade,” and “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” you haven’t heard McCrimmon sing them all the way up to the heavens.

Production values (featuring the production’s original Broadway designs) are uniformly high. Elaine Davidson does a terrific job conducting the show’s Broadway-caliber orchestra, who open the show with one of the most memorable “Overtures” ever to stir up an audience for what lies ahead.

Last but not least, triple-threat ensembles don’t get any better than the one completed by Kate E. Cook, Alex Hartman, Dot Kelley, Kathy Liu, Meghan Manning, Sami Murphy, Jordan Taylor, Sean Thompson, and Annaliese Wilbur on Opening Night.

Hannah Shankman plays Fanny at certain performances.

If it’s taken almost sixty years for Funny Girl to return to the Music Center, where its First National Tour played the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion back in 1965, it’s not just because its original book needed work (which it definitely did).

You simply can’t revive Funny Girl without a leading lady capable not only of stopping the show again and again and again but of holding an audience in the palm of her hand and never letting go. Katerina McCrimmon does just that, and I for one could have applauded all night.

Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles.
www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

–Steven Stanley
April 3, 2024
Photos: Matthew Murphy for MurphyMade

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