The Original Broadway Cast Album of Funny Girl was released by Capitol Records – but when it came time for the Funny Girl movie, Columbia Records retained the rights to release the soundtrack album.
Jule Styne and Bob Merrill contributed three new songs for the movie: “The Swan,” “Roller Skate Rag,” and “Funny Girl.”
Period songs not written by Styne and Merrill were added to the film, too: “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy with Somebody Else)”; “Second Hand Rose”; and “My Man.” Fanny Brice originally sang all of those songs, although she recorded “I’d Rather Be Blue” much later than the time period the movie covers.
Film composer Walter Scharf was hired as the film’s musical supervisor. Scharf received Oscar nominations for his musical work on Hans Christian Andersen (1953) and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1972).
For Funny Girl’s soundtrack, Scharf explained, “It was a challenge to adapt the music from the Broadway Funny Girl and it intrigued me,” he said. “I wanted to keep the period mood of Fanny Brice’s time alive and yet contemporize the music at the same time.”
Jule Styne told a Streisand biographer, “I was upset with the orchestrations for the entire movie. They were going for pop arrangements. ‘My Man,’ which wasn’t in the show, and didn’t belong in the movie, was like a Las Vegas arrangement. They dropped eight songs from the Broadway show and we were asked to write some new ones … But of all my musicals they screwed up, Funny Girl came out the best.”
Working with Barbra Streisand on the Funny Girl film “wasn't always easy or peaceful,” said Walter Scharf, in an interview with Patricia Davis. “But,” Scharf added “the results I think justify the effort and sometimes agonies we went through.”
“They warned me she was temperamental and stubborn,” Scharf said. “She was. She was and is also one of the most original and gifted artists I have ever encountered. There has been a lot of controversy about this girl. Barbra was temperamental, but only as a way of striving for perfection. People like Barbra, with great talent, have this burning desire to give their all and please their audiences. If they feel they've missed they get annoyed with themselves and this is misconstrued as temperament. The truly temperamental people are those without talent who create chaos just to be ornery.”
Walter Scharf had a cameo in the film—he played Barbra's accompanist during “Second Hand Rose.”
Columbia Records went all out to promote the Funny Girl LP, 4-track and 8-track stereo tape cartridges, and 4-track reel-to-reel tape. Columbia art director John Berg put together a top-notch package – the gatefold album that opened to Jack Brodsky’s liner notes on one side, and a photo collage from the movie on the other. The cover art was by famed movie illustrator Bob Peak. And the vinyl LP was inserted into picture sleeve that showed all of Barbra’s Columbia Records albums.
Warren Vincent, listed on the album as sound supervisor, told one Streisand biographer how he produced the soundtrack. “I went to Hollywood and got all the tapes from the movie,” he said. “I had to take the music off the seventy-millimeter film. Then the sound was balanced and cleaned up.”
