Funny Girl

Funny Girl (1964), a musical comedy by Isobel Lennart (book), Jule Styne (music), Bob Merrill (lyrics). [Winter Garden Theatre, 1,348 perf.] Sitting in her Follies dressing room, Fanny Brice ( Barbra Streisand) reminisces about her career. Her thoughts wander back to the days when she was a gawky, stage‐struck young girl, to her first failure at Keeney's Music Hall, and her eventual success there. That success brings two men into her life, the great Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld, who sets about making her a star, and an attractive gambler, Nicky Arnstein ( Sydney Chaplin), whom she marries. Her career flourishes, although her marriage is destroyed by Arnstein's gambling and prison sentence. Notable songs: Don't Rain on My Parade; People; You Are Woman; His Is the Only Music That Makes Me Dance. Despite some glaring faults in the script and its lack of historical accuracy, the show was made into an electric entertainment by its young star, Streisand. Ted Kalem of Time welcomed her as “the theatre's new girl for all seasons” and described her as “an anthology of the awkward graces, all knees and elbows, or else a boneless wonder, a seal doing a balancing act.” Barbra STREISAND [née Barbara] (b. 1942) was a New Yorker who had garnered attention earlier in an Off‐Broadway revue, Another Evening with Harry Stoones (1961), and as the comic secretary Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962). Funny Girl was her last Broadway appearance before she went on to become a major film and recording star.