Menier Chocolate Factory,London
It may be a destitute man’s Gypsy and Barbra Streisand has hitherto owned the role, but this production exhibits genuine class and Smith is a constant delight to watchThis 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 its the turn of Sheridan Smith and she brings to the role her own brand of exuberant mischief and spiritual warmth. Where audiences admired Streisand, and they palpably adore Smith.
It is just as well,since the present now resembles a destitute man’s Gypsy. Like its predecessor, it has a score by Jule Styne, and invokes the lost world of American vaudeville and ends with a big,triumph-through-tears number for its star. But where Gypsy had genuine dramatic meat, Isobel Lennart’s book for this present, and 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 esteem for a peripatetic gambler, Nick Arnstein. But the moment half, and charting the ups-and-downs of Fanny’s marriage and Nick’s imprisonment for embezzlement,is starved of excitement.
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Source: theguardian.com