Theater review: Funny Girl

by Joan Arbery of Renegade Bus

Yowzers! Lyric Stage’s Funny Girl (which just finished its run at the Irving Arts Center) is one tour de force of chutzpah. From Bryan Wofford’s scenic design to Tracy Jordan’s choreography to Cheryl Denson’s direction and musical staging, the production sparkles. At the heart of it, gleaming brighter than everything around it, stands Kristin Dausch. Her turn as Fanny Brice is everything from sweet, charming, and lovable, to clumsy, careless, and headstrong. She lives the role. And when she sings, she lets out a sound that shivers your timbers, bringing down the house.

Funny Girl is the story of Fanny Brice, a young vaudeville actress in NY on the cusp of the 1920s. By sheer will and a pipe organ for lungs, she makes her way up the Ziegfeld Follies ladder until she is the star of the show. But Fanny doesn’t get there through conventional means: beauty, nice legs, and a simpering air. Instead, she’s all about the nuts and bolts– she wants a career, she’s got the talent—maybe some day she’ll learn the grace. She’s so guileless and unaffected by her talent that regardless of the foul ups she makes, she scoots by unscathed.

Until she falls for Nick Arnstein, that is. Christopher Pinnella plays Arnstein, and his suave, dashing, romantic airs sculpt Arnstein into the kind of debonair, considerate, and cosmopolitan fellow few eligible women would have the fortitude to scorn. Not surprisingly, Fanny’s a goner. But Arnstein’s got a gambling habit, and while he inevitably falls for Fanny, he can’t reconcile her success to his increasingly empty pockets. Feeling more like Fanny’s boy-toy than a proper husband, Arnstein soon gets mixed up in crime, which leads to incarceration—not so funny.

Despite the fact that Funny Girl has a downward trajectory, you don’t often quite feel as high and transported as when Kristin Dausch reprises “Don’t Rain on My Parade” at the production’s end. While she’s grabbed us by “I’m the Greatest Star” at the beginning, and her comic timing and hilarious antics seal the deal with “You Are Woman, I Am Man,” the closing number is her apotheosis. Nick Arnstein seems like the biggest schmuck ever.

With strong performances from the ensemble, especially from Jerry Dumont as Eddie Ryan, his Fred Astaire-style dancing, affable manner, and loyalty to Fanny making him quite precious, and also from Lois Sonnier Hart as Mrs. Brice, who has a kind of no nonsense warmness and matter of fact grace that make the moments she’s on stage too few, the overall production feels effervescent.

What Lyric Stage’s production does so well is to succeed both at the glitz and glamour that makes up the over the top staginess of the Ziegfeld shows and at the everyday toils and travails that eventually cripple Brice and Arnstein’s love. From start to finish, this production, like Dausch’s Brice, enraptures.