Critique: A dazzling Katerina McCrimmon would make for an genuine Fanny Brice in ‘Funny Girl’

There’s a new Fanny Brice in city, and the question on everyone’s brain is can she are living up to the job immortalized by Barbra Streisand?

The ideal issue about Katerina McCrimmon’s dazzling effectiveness is that she can make the character her have. What else could she do? This touring generation of the 2022 Broadway revival, directed by Michael Mayer, has its individual historical past to contend with.

A miscast Beanie Feldstein released the Broadway return of “Funny Female,” and even people of us predisposed to appreciate her could not assistance leaving the display shaking our heads in bafflement. Rescue eventually came in the nuclear offer of Lea Michele, who seized the component of Fanny Brice as even though it experienced been unfairly denied her at any time considering that she experienced been singing tracks from the present on “Glee.” It was a excellent confluence of talent, type and tenacity, and Michele delivered one particular of the most sensational Broadway performances of the 21st century — a alternative who additional than atoned for the revival’s original sin of not casting her in the first spot.

No 1 could assume lightning to strike in accurately the very same way. This touring output, which opened at the Ahmanson Theatre on Wednesday, sensibly opts to go in a fully various route.

McCrimmon is a powerhouse singer, don’t get me wrong. She provides the dwelling down in Fanny’s poleaxing 1st-act quantities, “I’m the Biggest Star,” “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” from the golden age score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill. (Despite some ill-calibrated acoustics, the overture on your own appeared to have a euphoric impact on Ahmanson patrons with extended reminiscences.)

But the distinguishing feature of McCrimmon’s functionality is that it provides us closer to the real Fanny Brice, the vaudeville comedian who struck it huge in the Ziegfeld Follies. Streisand and Michele had been swathed in preternatural glamour. Fanny is designed to really feel like chopped liver in the seems to be department, but the star radiance of these performers could not support poking by the character’s humble beginnings.

McCrimmon’s Fanny, by distinction, has the hectic air of a jobbing performer, a scrapper much more than a guaranteed thing, a single who learned to communicate as quick as humanly doable ahead of the doorway slams in her deal with. What sets her aside is the authenticity of her humor. She is aware how ludicrous she appears on phase in a lineup of leggy ladies. But it is her wisecracks — with their racy, self-deprecating wildness — that allow her to glow on her possess phrases.

The emphasis on “Funny Girl” tends to be on nailing the classic New York Jewish milieu. Harvey Fierstein’s revision of Isobel Lennart’s e book relocates Fanny’s origins to Brooklyn from the Reduce East Aspect, but it’s all the exact environment. Melissa Manchester, a match trouper, brings her flamboyant Bronx pedigree to the function of Mrs. Brice. (It’s very clear where by Fanny has gotten her “oy vey” and “fakakta” exhalations from.) Projections of tenements give David Zinn’s fleet scenic design and style that aged-timey Large Apple taste.

But it is the seamlessness among Fanny’s professional and particular everyday living that McCrimmon captures to perfection. Regularity of character might not feel like these types of a breathtaking theatrical advantage, but it’s what makes this Fanny not just exclusive but historically credible. McCrimmon’s portrayal resists the Broadway myth to uncover mortal radiance instead.

Feldstein, to her credit score, was a extra adept actual physical comic. Fanny’s vaudeville turns absence the pop they experienced on Broadway. The vigor and vibrancy have pale on the highway, but the backstage business enterprise is just ideal.

Smitten nevertheless far too delicate to insist, Eddie Ryan (Izaiah Montaque Harris, faucet dancing his way into our affections) normally takes Fanny beneath his wing, getting her dance captain and lovelorn confidant. Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Coppage) is accustomed to ruling his Follies with an iron fist but he comes to recognize that strong-willed Fanny is a jackpot value indulging. The other dancers can’t enable getting a kick out of the kook who’s boosting box business for absolutely everyone.

When McCrimmon’s Fanny is wooed by the exquisite, smooth-conversing, alluringly shady Nick Arnstein (Stephen Mark Lukas), she never loses Fanny Brice’s protecting comedian armor. No, the romance involving this Fanny and Nick is not as sultry as it was when Michele’s Fanny and Ramin Karimloo’s Nick melted into just about every other at the August Wilson Theatre in New York. But what Lukas’ Nick sees in McCrimmon’s Fanny — a brilliant, lovable, hilariously authentic girl — redounds to his credit rating.

Lukas’ portrayal deepens as the marriage concerning Nick and Fanny disintegrates. He can’t stand the concept of residing in her shadow — which is no shock from the guy who places the moves on her although singing “You Are Woman, I Am Guy.” But this Nick is in the long run as sympathetic as the show’s heroine — and just as much of a casualty of a planet in which achievement expenditures all the things you cherish most outside of your possess survival.

The ending of “Funny Girl” this time all over introduced to thoughts the last moments of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Bravery and Her Young children,” when the protagonist picks up her wagon in the facial area of all her losses and heads back into battle to market her wares. Fanny is a a lot more endearing determine of indomitable stamina but no considerably less decided.

Clearly show business will not stave off her loneliness — she can not get the adoring viewers household with her, as she wistfully muses — but it’s how she presses on. The highlight is the place she thrives. As Fanny acknowledges in “The Audio That Would make Me Dance,” she’s “better on phase than at intermission.” And McCrimmon, whose voice grows extra majestic and multi-hued as the musical’s emotion ramps up, provides this aching anthem with heartrending virtuosity.

This revival of “Funny Girl” revives the glory of musicals earlier, when tunes appeared to spring out of their characters’ souls. Knowing that “people who require persons are the luckiest folks of all,” Fanny generously gives herself and theatergoers what we both have been desperately longing for.