This bio-musical about the American comic and singer Fanny Brice is an unashamed star vehicle. Barbra Streisand famously staked her claim to the title in the 1964 Broadway production and the 1968 movie. Now it’s the turn of Sheridan Smith and she brings to the role her own brand of exuberant mischief and spiritual warmth. Where audiences admired Streisand, they palpably adore Smith.
It is just as well, since the show now resembles a poor man’s Gypsy. Like its predecessor, it has a score by Jule Styne, invokes the lost world of American vaudeville and ends with a big, triumph-through-tears number for its star. But where Gypsy had real dramatic meat, Isobel Lennart’s book for this show, even when revised by Harvey Fierstein, is a flimsy affair. The first half amusingly charts Fanny’s pre-1914 rise from Brooklyn-born hoofer to comic star of the Ziegfeld Follies and her rapturous love for a peripatetic gambler, Nick Arnstein. But the second half, charting the ups-and-downs of Fanny’s marriage and Nick’s imprisonment for embezzlement, is starved of excitement.
Fortunately, Smith is a constant joy to watch. Fanny claimed “I’ve got 36 expressions” and Smith uses just as many to convey the heroine’s irrepressible spirit. Noting, on first meeting Nick, that he has paint on his nails, she does a derisive “Huh!” that conveys hilarious doubts about his virility. Smith is also good at delivering snappy Mae West one-liners so that when Nick reveals he breeds horses she retorts: “What’s the matter? They can’t do it themselves?” But Smith, as well as possessing the long upper lip of the natural comic, never lets you forget that Fanny has the social gaucherie of the workaholic: in a very funny diner à deux scene, she is all flailing limbs as she attempts to avoid instant seduction.
Smith can also put across a number. When she sings People, she reminds us that it is not a big belter but a touchingly rueful song about a woman yearning for a private life for which she’s never had time. Even in Don’t Rain on My Parade, Smith avoids brassy rhetoric to suggest a lonely woman exulting in her new-found happiness. It’s an excellent performance that strips the role of armour-plated implacability to make Fanny a likeable human being. Even though he looks good in a ruffled shirt and sings well, Darius Campbell can’t find much colour and variety in the one-dimensional Nick. The best support for Fanny comes from Marilyn Cutts as her aspirational mother and Joel Montague as her lovingly loyal dance teacher.
But, even if it’s a less-than-great musical, Michael Mayer’s production and Michael Pavelka’s design exhibit real class. Two parallel travelators give the action a permanent physical momentum. Without swamping the show in spectacle, Mayer also evokes the dressy opulence of the Ziegfeld Follies (with very good costumes by Matthew Wright), and even the familiar device of miniaturised trains and boats is wittily used to suggest Fanny’s headlong pursuit of her adored Arnstein. In the end, however, the show rests squarely on the shoulders of Sheridan Smith, who suggests that, as with Shakespeare’s Beatrice, a star danced at her nativity.
- At Menier Chocolate Factory until 5 March. At the Savoy Theatre from 8 April. Buy tickets at theguardianboxoffice.com.
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