Funny Girl - Boston Tryout- Page 2

[broadway guy]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:05pm

How was Barbra's attendance record during her run?

[AnthVoice2010]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:23pm

Barbra missed very little of her 800+ performances...(I think the number is under 10).

Now..

Did she sleep walk through some performances?

Did she show up most nights 10-15 minutes before curtain - giving everyone heart palpitations?

Did she willfully cut songs, scenes, anything, to get her out of there as quickly as possible? (the show some nights ran 15 minutes shorter than the established run time)

Did she give notes to cast and crew about anything that displeased her?

Was he unbelievably rude to fans and would her "stage door" antics (ignoring fans, cursing at them, avoiding them at every cost)be considered suicidal in this day and age?

Was she a holy terror to control simply because she knew (as did everyone else)the whole thing rested on her 22 year old shoulders?




yes....and even she has said as much...

[ljay889]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:27pm

She cursed at fans at the stage door? Is there any proof of that?

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:32pm

I'm sure there must be some footage of this on YouTube courtesy of someone's vintage iPhone.

[broadway guy]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:34pm

I have heard a few people on here say she lost interest in the role a couple months into her run and the real fun for her was figuring out the role when it was in pre production. There is some live footage of her performance and its quite fantastic.

[ljay889]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:39pm

I'm not asking for video proof, love. But are there any first hand accounts or documentation that she did that?

Updated On: 7/7/13 at 01:39 PM

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:45pm

There is some live footage of her performance and its quite fantastic.

Fantastic? Really? The ONLY footage that exists of Barbra on Broadway in FUNNY GIRL is a few short seconds of silent color 8mm home movie footage filmed by one of the dancers in the chorus. Filmed from the balcony and filmed from the wings. No sound; just seconds of footage and truly impossible to judge her performance from these.

[broadway guy]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:51pm

There is definitely sound on the ones i have been watching. There is one video where she sings the last few notes of "greatest star" and she knocks it out of the park. The audience went crazy.

Also there is audio of her last performance. Here she sings "People":
http://youtu.be/biOLlaBTG2Q


Updated On: 7/7/13 at 01:51 PM

[gossipguy215]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 1:59pm

This is from the final night soundboard. You can tell because she starts crying at the end. This entire performance was her "all". It is amazing to listen to her pour her heart out in her performances of the ENTIRE show (she cut a lot of stuff out on some nights, sometimes ending "DON'T RAIN ON MY PARADE" on "HERE I AM!"). This truly is Barbra at her best. I wish an audio of the try-out version of the show existed, or even a script. I am OBSESSED with FUNNY GIRL.

[broadway guy]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 2:04pm

I'm becoming more and more obsessed with this show after hearing Barbra sing her face off in these rare videos.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 2:12pm

There is definitely sound on the ones i have been watching. There is one video where she sings the last few notes of "greatest star" and she knocks it out of the park. The audience went crazy.

The audio is from that soundboard audio recording of her final performance (December 1965) which someone cleverly semi-synced the corresponding portions to the silent footage. The original footage is silent as consumer 8mm home movie cameras didn't start having sound until the mid-70s.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 2:18pm

Brody, there is about 35 minutes of color footage from the show. It is silent footage that has been dubbed over with the soundboard audio, similar to the hour or so footage of MAME.

[AnthVoice2010]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 3:44pm

This is amazing...listen to what Bacall says at the end....this was taped an hour after opening night.
Funny Girl - Opening Night

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 4:18pm

She received a congratulatory telegram from Natalie Wood! Now I'm impressed with Barbra Streisand!

[alterego]

Posted: 7/7/13 at 9:56pm

Get hold of Garson Kanin's book Smash*. It is a thinly veiled account of getting FUNNY GIRL to Broadway.

*The TV series Smash acknowledges the Garson Kanin book in its credits, however other than the title it has very little to do with the book.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 2:48pm

There ought to be a book on the pre-Broadway Funny Girl dish.

It opened in Boston and bombed. Kanin didn't have a clue and Robbins came in then. Kanin was unseen for the rest of the tryout. He did get his royalties however. Within the biz, it is thought of as a Robbins show. 5 songs were replaced and 50Gs worth of scenery out of a then-record 750Gs total budget (Dolly and Fiddler each came in for 375G) was tossed out.

Cut songs: on Barbra's "People" album, Absent Minded Me is one of the cut songs (maybe for Who Are You Now?) and supposedly Roller Skate Rag that used in the film was cut either in rehearsal or out of town and was replaced by Cornet Man. (The skates survived however--look at the logo; the upside down girl is wearing skates.)

You Are Woman was originally done straight, and it is said that it was Barbra's idea to make it farcical and that worked but good.

After Boston was 3 weeks in Philly where they were still in trouble. The NY opening was delayed, and they extended 2 weeks in Philly. However the Forrest where they were playing had another booking so they switched theatres to the since-demolished and little used Erlanger. This is the only instance of a show trying out switching theatres in the same city that I know of.

Then in a time when shows were only starting to play public previews in NY, Funny Girl had about 3 weeks of them. By comparison that season Dolly and others had none.

There were seven different announced opening nights including 3 in the final week: first was Tuesday the 24th, then Sunday the 22nd and finally Thursday March 26th. The show opened 4 weeks later than originally announced.

The last scene had about 45 versions, the last of which was being rehearsed by Barbra and Sydney Chaplin behind the house curtain as the audience was entering the theatre on opening night.

The book (and film script for that matter) is strictly by the numbers: good girl with talent held back but not for long, by a no-good man who did her wrong. The score on the other hand is one of the all-time greats.

I read the NY Times faithfully during this stormy tryout and pieced a lot of this together from that. There were also major cover articles in Time, Life and Look Magazines that made mention of the various trials and tribulations. Add in later info from vaious books and yet the whole story does not appear in any one place.

Barbra ended up on stage for all but 20 minutes of the show which basically covered her 4 hair style changes (in these pre-wig days) and 10-12 costume changes.

And to think this was first offered to Mary Martin (at age 50 no less) and then to Anne Bancroft!

PS - Yes, she and Chaplin had a fling out-of-town. When they came back to NY they went home to their respective spouses. However something was not right and 8 months after opening Chaplin was let go and bought out of his contract. It took a while before another "name" was engaged to play Nick. He was Johnny Desmond who was a nightclub singer and a wholly instinctive actor. A stage manager blocked him into the show, but Barbra came in afterwards and directed him into it. Johnny played the rest of the run with Barbra who he got along with fine and later with Mimi Hines with whom he decidedly did not.
The Johnny-info came from the woman who was living with Johnny at the time. Never mind that Johnny had a wife living elsewhere and to whom he returned.

[best12bars]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:05pm

I remember reading that a tie can only happen if the two nominees are within 3-5 votes of each other - not one.

VoiceAnth---that rule was in place originally until it happened in the early 1930s, with a "tie" between Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Wallace Berry (The Champ). They actually did not tie. Fredric March had 1 more vote than Beery, but the rule was that you had to come "within 3 votes" and they would consider it a tie.

After that, the rule was changed.

The only way to tie for an Oscar now is to receive the exact same number of votes. So when Streisand tied with Hepburn in 1968, it was a true tie.

That's why the controversy arose about her being admitted to the Academy before the final voting (with only one film credit and one nomination). Since we can assume she voted for herself, by allowing her in, she essentially cast the tying vote.

I personally don't see it that way. She didn't do anything "illegal" to get it, and the fact that they tied is still pretty astounding.

Anyway ... back to your regularly scheduled programming. But that's the history of the "tie" rules for Oscar.

[gavyj]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:11pm

"Barbra ended up on stage for all but 20 minutes of the show which basically covered her 4 hair style changes (in these pre-wig days) and 10-12 costume changes."

Prewig days? So they had to restyle her hair 4 times during the show? Wow. And people complain about basic costume changes now.

On that note, when did wigs become popular on Broadway?

[artscallion]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:31pm

I'm confused WOSQ. Tell me more about these pre-wig days. I grew up in the 60s and my mother and all her friends had dozens of wigs, falls, etc. It was wig-mania at that time. Are you saying they didn't use wigs in theatre back then? More info, please.

[WOSQ]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:37pm

Wigs vs pre-wigs.

I think her shoulder length 'young Fanny' was a wig. The other styles could have been supplemented by falls. [The hair was down, it went up, it got covered by a hat, it was ratted up, a fall was plugged in, it is the way hair happened. Do stock sometime. You won't know from wigs unless they're yours.]

Wigs came in slowly because the producer had/has to pay for them.

And Barbra missed two performances in the two years she did Funny Girl; a Wednesday matinee and evening. Her understudy who was in the chorus, was Lainie Kazan (yes, the now plus-sized Lainie) who was a bit of a busty sex bomb then. Lainie played the matinee, but called an agent who got press people there for the evening ("Big Star Sick! Unknown Does Lead!") and got some nice write-ups. I remember one in Time Magazine. However the star was not amused and soon Ms. Kazan was seeking employment elsewhere.

Merv Griffin among others, heard her sing and soon she was appearing in clubs and on television and made about half a dozen albums. If she hadn't been fired, she wouldn't have been available to take all those career-enhancing gigs.

Lainie has a really nice instrument and can wrap it around a lot of types of music. She did an independent album in the 90s that I would play for people to see if they could guess the artist. Nobody ever guessed correctly. Even with clues like, "She is considered a punchline these days."

[best12bars]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:38pm

I think you're all wigging out.

Wigs go back forever, on stage and in film.

[artscallion]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 3:43pm

that's what I thought.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 4:59pm

And to think this was first offered to Mary Martin (at age 50 no less) and then to Anne Bancroft!

And Carol Burnett.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 5:09pm

Somewhere it was mentioned that Barbra used a body mic. Was the technology in place at that time to do this? And if so, why weren't more people using them?

[nealb1]

Posted: 7/8/13 at 6:21pm

Be sure and read the recent bio on Barbra, "Hello, Gorgeous." It goes into great detail about the show and all the changes that happened before Boston, during, and Broadway previews.