‘Funny Girl’ Broadway Review: No Rain On Beanie Feldstein’s Parade, But Expect Some Drizzle

**Editor’s note: To properly review “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness,” you have to tread into the basic plot, and the basic plot has been kept secret from audiences and withheld from the trailers. Thus, this review will have to get into *some* basic spoilers, so if you want to be totally spoiler-free, we encourage you to read this review after you’ve seen the film.

If you’ve already binged Selling Sunset’s season five then you’ll know about Christine Quinn's ongoing drama with the rest of the Selling Sunset cast, Heather and Tarek’s wedding, a new British-Nigerian cast member Chelsea Lazkani and Jason Oppenheim and Chrishell Stause’s relationship. There is a lot more to get excited about because The Oppenheim Group will reunite to discuss all that’s happened in this season.

Is this a Walther PPK which I see before me? Almost! It’s former James Bond actor Daniel Craig, who’s starring as the Scottish king killer in “Macbeth” on Broadway. His uninvolving and ponderous production (it opened Thursday night at the Longacre Theatre, but barred critics from publishing reviews till midday Friday for reasons that will soon become obvious to you) is a real Blunderball.Two hours and 20 minutes, with one intermission. At the Longacre Theatre, 220 W 48th Street.

A very busy Broadway season comes to a close with its final production, and Sam Gold’s staging of Macbeth starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga is nothing if not a dynamic attempt to cap an unusual and often extraordinary theater season. Uneven – if not so much as Gold’s 2019 King Lear with Glenda Jackson – and peppered with choices both curious (what, no “double double toil and trouble?”) and captivating (a brief prologue that’s as funny as it is timely), this iteration of The Scottish Play, which opened last night at the Longacre Theatre, nearly holds up to the unavoidable hype of its starry cast.

Ramin Karimloo, the male lead of Broadway’s Funny Girl, will be out of the show temporarily after testing positive for Covid just four day’s after the musical revival’s opening night.

If “The West Wing” was made into a live stage show, banned all men and snorted a line of coke before the curtain went up, it might look something like “POTUS,” the hyperactive new farce that opened Wednesday on Broadway.One hour and 45 minutes, with one intermission. At the Shubert Theatre, 225 W 44th Street.Selina Fillinger’s weird and wired comedy imagines a White House fiasco, in which the president — we never meet him or anyone else with a Y chromosome — publicly makes a crass remark about the first lady (Vanessa Williams) and leaves a crew of panicked women staffers to clean up his PR mess.And what a mess it is.

Like some strange brew blend of VEEP, Noises Off and one of the late Charles Ludlam’s outrageously vulgar (and still sorely missed) Ridiculous Theatrical Company follies, Selina Fillinger’s all-female, star-packed political satire POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive is an occasionally glorious mess of a farce, sometimes chaotically funny and other times as what-were-they-thinking?? goofy as the last segment of a Saturday Night Live episode.

Broadway box office held steady last week as the production roster reached its full, 35-show season maximum: Though some productions remained in previews, everything that’s going to open before the end of the season was up and running, with no Covid cancelations or postponements.

Wilson Chapman editorThe bar at the August Wilson Theater, a lounge the theater’s owner Jordan Roth opened last year, was quiet after the curtain fell over Broadway’s first revival of “Funny Girl.”Save the chatter of interviews to the press and some small talk over sandwiches laid out for those who stayed behind, the atmosphere inside the theater in New York City on Sunday was hushed, subdued even, after the opening night of a historic musical: For the first time in 58 years, not since it first opened with an unknown Barbra Streisand in its leading role, “Funny Girl” is again on Broadway.Directed by Michael Mayer with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, the revival stars Beanie Feldstein as Fanny Brice. In the lobby of the theater, leaning against the wall after a barrage of press and her opening night bows, Feldstein could use a second to breathe.“I’m a woman who needs to be distracted,” she said, thoughtful and sincere with her words.

Jonah Hill is one proud brother!

NEW YORK -- When Broadway's revival of “Funny Girl” begins, star Beanie Feldstein sits in a Broadway dressing room, getting ready to go on. She wonders nervously to her assistant: "You ever feel like there’s someone watching from the shadows?"The line takes an extra jolt of meaning because Feldstein is stepping into hallowed ground.

Beanie Feldstein, who was a smash as Monica Lewinsky in “American Crime Story: Impeachment” last year, takes on the Brooklyn comic legend who sings classic hits like “People” and “Don’t Rain On My Parade.” She is supposed to steal our hearts and sprain our funny bones. No dice.Ticket-buyers are walking in forgivingly, with an understanding that we don’t expect any Broadway performer to match up to one of the greatest American vocalists of all time. Feldstein, however, barely muddles through the beloved songs.

Frank Rizzo “You ever feel like there’s someone watching from the shadows?” asks Beanie Feldstein’s Fanny Brice, as haunting apparitions from the Ziegfeld star’s past waft in and out in a kind of “Fanny’s ‘Follies’.”The problem with this uninspired revival of “Funny Girl” — which opened at the August Wilson Theatre on Sunday, marking the show’s Broadway return after nearly 60 years — is not simply the singular ghost of she who shall not be named. (Alright: It’s Barbra Steisand.) Rather, the issue here is the production’s inability to live up to its star-making potential that would have made us once again forgive the simplistic, sentimental and sanitized original book credited to Isobel Lennart.

Sneaky, menacing and funny are descriptions that come up more than once in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, but not one of the three words quite does justice to this irresistibly pitch-black comedy, opening tonight at the Golden Theatre on Broadway.

Show business thrives on risk — even existential risk. Take this Broadway moment when new shows are opening at a pace that shocks even grizzled veterans – 15 in April alone. Of course, some will quickly be shuttering due to Broadway’s two dire enemies: critics and Covid. Ticket buyers must navigate a complex landscape.

Director and choreographer Camille A. Brown and her cast of seven female singer-dancer-actors breathe life and vitality into Ntozake Shange’s still-potent mid-1970s touchstone for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. Opening tonight at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, Shange’s fantasia of poetry, dance and stories of confession, defiance, sisterhood and, above all, perseverance, holds a power that’s not been weakened either by decades or the loss of a once startling newness.