Fanny Brice: America's Funny Girl

David H. Bell’s reworking of Fanny Brice: America’s Funny Girl, his 2009 hit at Maltz Jupiter Theater, bears the best qualities associated with Asolo Rep: strong, glitzy production values and performances to match. With only four actors, it yet shows off Fanny Brice in a fashion glittery enough to rival her original treatment by the Great Ziegfield. (He’s shown off, too.)

For openers, Fanny’s third husband Billy Rose lures her backstage at a Broadway theater in 1936 where he had to close his last revue. Because of her success in “The Great Ziegfield,” he’s sold Hollywood on doing a film of Fanny’s life as if it’s been scripted.

Before going off on another project and after cajoling Fanny into reminiscing in the atmosphere of her triumphs, Billy leaves her to writer Harold Underhill (believable Lance Baker). With a six month deadline, she tells him of her storied life on and offstage, mostly in flashbacks of song and dance. Also with present sighs for her troubles with the men she married.

Fanny (incarnated with energy and a great voice by a prettier Marya Grandy) illustrates how she made famous songs from Rose of Washington Square as a sort of continuous vaudevillian to “Second-Hand Rose” as a Ziegfield star to “My Man” as a serious vocalist. She dances with flair to accompany script-advancers like “Do it Again” and “Ain't We Got Fun?” that illuminate her infatuation with Nicky Arnstein.

What most set Fanny apart was her comedic talent. It’s on display here with a hilarious segment of her balletic take on “The Dying Swan” and lesser though still funny, “Oh, How She Could Yacki-Hacki Wicki-Wacki Woo” and “I’m an Indian? -- proclaimed with a Yiddish accent. A rather unfunny skit with too much screaming for my tastes, though, commemorates her signal creation of Baby Snooks.

Director David H. Bell wafts Marya Grandy through Fanny’s tribulations without a lull, a feat made the more amazing by her continual changes of Ian Weinberger’s dazzling array of costumes. Stef Tovar smoothly ducks in and out as a harried, untrustworthy Billy Rose and apart from his minor appearances as Irving Berlin and others.

Lance Baker is both a smooth con man and despicable criminal as Fanny’s great love Arnstein, who nearly ruined and blithely abandoned her. (Btw, their children are never in evidence.) Primarily as Ziegfeld, Norm Boucher projects sophistication, an eye for both talent and business, but not without heart. His vocalizing “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” makes the most of its arrangement and Katie Spelman’s inventive use of mannequins in choreographing.

Altogether, this musical is as pleasant as a cabaret revue. Essentially, that’s what it seems to be -- with overblown but pretty staging and unnecessary overmicing of a star who projects well all by herself. The Brice biographical details are interesting, though p.r. for Asolo’s non-Rep show aptly state it recreates “the spirit of ballyhoo, flim-flam and artistic genius of the early Broadway era.”