Have you heard the story of the famous comedian whose antics delight millions of devoted fans but whose personal life is a mess? Of course you have! No playwright ever lost money assuring audiences that behind every clown's smile lurks a tragic past. This moralistic myth becomes even more ubiquitous when our hap-hap-happy hero is a woman, doomed by our cultural biases to wallow in Marianistic melancholy in order to earn our pity and affection.
You won't find any of that nonsense in Kimberly Faye Greenberg's refreshingly upbeat portrait of Fanny Brice, though. Twentieth-century America's original "Funny Girl" was born to unentitled immigrant parents dwelling in New York City's Lower East Side ghetto, leaving their ambitious daughter no recourse but to forge success on nothing but talent, chutzpah, and a refusal to allow other people's' problems to become her problems—all practical traits for a tough cookie with a habit of marrying men long on romantic fancy, but short on reliability.
So, for every sentimental schmaltzspiele in the score of this solo revue—"Me and My Shadow,” "More Than You Know" and the inevitable hankie-wringing French-import torcher "My Man"—Greenberg includes an upbeat patter song like "Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye" or the vintage dialect ditty "Sadie Salome, Go Home" that launched not one, but two careers in 1909—Brice's and that of "Irv from the neighborhood" (or as goyishe musical mavens know him, Irving Berlin). Greenberg's script even takes us forward in time to include the barn-burning anthem "Don't Rain On My Parade" from the musical Funny Girl.
To be sure, a comic aesthetic based in equal-opportunity Otherness can be problematic these days, but Greenberg tones down the parochial elements inherent therein to project a gemutlich conviviality rendering even the potentially offensive "I'm an Indian, Too" free of any rancor. Displaying a chesty vocal delivery well up to the challenge of replicating Brice's legendary long final notes and a supple physique capable of conjuring a bevy of auxiliary characters (including several gentlemen suitors), aided only by an eight-foot pink feather boa and half a size XX overcoat, with further assistance provided by pianoman Christopher McGovern for this performance, Greenberg's "Second Hand Rose" persona commands the stage to embrace her virtual audience like a big warm hug.
