Miss Smith, superstar
If there were any doubt that Sheridan Smith is a leading light of musical theatre, then take a look at the UK dates for Funny Girl. Smith has just played three sold-out nights as Fanny Brice at the 2,000-seat Manchester Palace Theatre, while the show will visit 21 similarly sized venues over the next six months. Smith will play 12; the remainder will star Natasha J Barnes, who ably stepped in during the London run when Smith briefly withdrew suffering from exhaustion. It’s an actor’s equivalent of a stadium tour.
Smith has already received accolades galore for her performance as vaudeville sensation Brice, the role one used to describe as immortalised by Barbra Streisand in the 1968 movie before Smith came along. It’s worth giving her a few more though, because, frankly, she’s extraordinary. She’s rightly been highly praised for her TV appearance in the BBC’s Shannon Matthews kidnap drama The Moorside but, as even her early performance in the 2010 West End hit Legally
Blonde attested, it’s in the greasepaint and glamour of live theatre that this instinctive comedian truly dazzles.
Julie Stern and Bob Merrill’s 1964 musical is the thinly sketched story of Brice, the Lower East Side Jewish clown who, in an early triumph for feminists everywhere, refused to play the all-American feminine ideal and won over Broadway with her kooky, unvarnished self instead.
There’s always been a streak of East End landlady about Smith, a brawny mix of sauce and steel, and it’s that spirited rawness that sets her apart from Streisand. Smith’s Brice is much less glossy, cool and self-absorbed. She’s funnier and more subversive, too. In her first Ziegfeld Follies audition, she flaunts her ungainly physique like a badge of honour, while flashing the audience a conspiratorial grin.
Smith has now so settled into Brice that when she muddled a couple of sentences during the performance I saw, she simply incorporated it into Brice’s goofy schtick. As she finds success, falling hopelessly in love with the no-good gambler Nick Arnstein along the way, Smith’s emotionally impulsive, heart-on-sleeve Brice doesn’t use the theatre as an escape from her innate social clumsiness, but as an embrace where it can be set free. And while Smith’s voice isn’t exactly beautiful, it aches with conviction. Her tremendous rendition of People is steeped in yearning, but also cut through with defiance. Her final big weepie, Don’t Rain on My Parade – reprised in her dressing room; her marriage in ruins at her feet – is both elegy and battle cry.
Michael Mayer’s jaunty, elegantly choreographed production glides by like a dream. From backstage at the Follies to a Baltimore station to a Lower East Side tenement, scenes flit by with minimum fuss. Yes, at almost three hours long, it could lose 20 minutes. But there’s strong work from a support cast who must know they are but moons in Smith’s orbit – particularly Chris Peluso’s Nick Arnstein.
It’s Smith, though, who conquers all here, finding in some of the country’s biggest theatres an electrifying intimacy. No mistake: she’s a superstar.