Theater: On the Rue Streisand

Funny Girl. If New York were Paris, Broadway could temporarily consider renaming itself the Rue Streisand. Some stars merely brighten up a marquee; Barbra Streisand sets an entire theater ablaze. Funny Girl—the saga of famed Comedienne Fanny Brice which opened last week in Manhattan—has fireworks. Streisand has firepower.

Nothing in this newborn star quite conforms to the clichés of stardom. Her profile might have come from an ancient bas-relief found in the valley of the Nile, but her tongue is asphalt-coated in the speech patterns of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her voice is too nasal to be winningly melodic, but she uses it like a jazz instrument, improvising a jumping rhetoric of sound. She can bring a song phrase to a growling halt, or let it drift lyrically like a ribbon of smoke. Her lyrics seem not to have been learned by rote, but branded on her heart, and when she sings or dances, some elemental beat of energy and joy sends riffs through her long mandarin fingers, her rocking pelvis, and restless toes.

At times Barbra Streisand bears an uncanny resemblance to Fanny Brice, but echoes of yesteryear are not the real point. For in her own right Streisand is the compleat clown, psychologically foiling the world by supplying her own banana peels to slip on. Her face is a choppy sea of doubletalk, and her talk tries to take back what her face just said. She is an anthology of the awkward graces, all knees and elbows, or else a boneless wonder, a seal doing an unbalancing act. All her devices are attention-getting devices and point astutely to the gnawing doubt of self at the heart of clowning. Barbra Streisand could be a gawkish version of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, except that all the Tramp usually wanted was a full bowl of soup, and the character Barbra plays wants the world for her pearl-filled oyster.

That, of course, forms the plot of Funny Girl, how sheer grit is polished into great talent and the price that is paid for that pearl of success. This familiar story failed in Sophie (about Sophie Tucker) and Jennie (about Laurette Taylor), but it is surprisingly successful in Funny Girl. The difference is partly that Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice is driven by the heat of desire rather than the cold of ambition, has spasms of panic as well as mountains of spunk. The usual standbys are unusually appealing. Kay Medford’s stage mother is more loving than shoving, and her chopped-liver-on-wry dialogue is a deadpan delight. And Danny Meehan, as Fanny’s unrequited lover and faithful friend, makes a dreary role cheery just by standing on his head to whistle. Sydney Chaplin has a cheerlessly unwritten part as Nicky Arnstein, the gambler and jailbird whom Fanny loves, marries, overmanages, and loses. It scarcely helps that Chaplin lackadaisically stands around in a tuxedo most of the evening looking like a rented escort at the wrong address.

Since Fanny Brice quickly became a Ziegfeld Follies star, Choreographer Carol Haney gets the chance to stage two period numbers that are rare nostalgic treats. One is an opulent salute to American beauties decked out in bridal gowns and diaphanous little nothings. In Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat, a platoon of World War I doughboys and red-white-and-blue-gartered doughgirls spill down a cascade of stairs without a military misstep and break into a machine-gun volley of precision tap dancing. From the poignant Who Are You Now? to the spitfiery Don’t Rain on My Parade, the Jule Styne-Bob Merrill score stays melodically true to each moment’s mood and is moreover listenably literate.

Funny Girl’s second act drags a bit, inevitably, since success gained and love lost both slow the heartbeats they once quickened. But the life of this musical courses through the arteries of Barbra Streisand’s many talents, and her dramatic pulse never falters. Actress, songstress, dancer, comedienne, mimic, clown—she is the theater’s new girl for all seasons.