Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-05-09 (Thursday)

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

Funny Girl (TCM) 1968 musical starring Barbra Stresand as a real life
singer who rises to fame while falling in love with Omar Sharif.

While Fanny Brice could sing, she's best known as a comedienne, and on
radio variety programs (and eventually her own program) later in her
career as a sketch comic, especially the Baby Snooks character. In the
sequel movie Funny Lady (1975), they have one brief scene with her radio
program, which was ridiculous. She had an enormous nationwide audience
and that's what she was famous for. The sequel was disappointing but has
a few good songs in it. Barbra didn't want to do the sequel but she was
already contracted for it.

The "real life singer" is Barbra herself, given that the Broadway
production (developed by Brice's son-in-law) made Barbra a superstar.

Kay Medford was also in the original Broadway cast.

I have tickets to see Funny Girl live on stage this weekend.  I wanted
to watch the original movie before seeing it live.  I saw the movie once
before many years ago but didn't remember it.  On this viewing I think
I liked it a bit more.  It's still not a movie I'd particularly want to
revisit, but it was watchable.

I think my problem with the movie is that it's not stagey enough. Some
of the big production numbers don't work, especially the earliest one
showing the Jewish community she came from. That's always come off as
contemporary and not from its historic period.

I want to see the stage scenes, and I wanted more of the rehearsal
scenes for the Ziegfeld musicals. The pregnant gag in the "beautiful
girls" stage act cracks me up every time I see it. I know it's coming,
and it's still funny.

As far as Fanny not being pretty... She wasn't a Ziegfeld girl, but she
posed for a series of nudes when she was a young adult, and they're
quite erotic in an era in which nude photography wasn't always condemned
as sinful. She was quite skinny but she was reasonably pretty. I always
liked her looks.

Barbra herself was always told she'd never have a career with that big
ethnic Jewish nose and she needed to get it fixed. She refused, knowing
it would hurt her ability to sing. I always took some of the plot points
on not being pretty to be more about Barbra herself than the character
she played.

So, who is playing Barbra, er, Fanny?