Streisand / LIVE 

Irene Sharaff won five Academy Awards for costume design: An American in Paris, The King and I, West Side Story, Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was also nominated for five Tony Awards. Sharaff designed the West Side Story costumes (both stage and screen versions) as well as Funny Girl—again, costumes for both the stage play and film.

“I see everything in blocks of color,” Sharaff said about her style, “rather like a painting. If I have a leitmotif, a logo, I suspect it is associated with the colors I prefer: reds, pinks, oranges.”

Sharaff wrote about Streisand in her 1976 book Broadway & Hollywood: Costumes Designed by Irene Sharaff. 

“Barbra had an extraordinary memory about movies and stars. With the strong streak of Walter Mitty in her, she would turn up at fittings impersonating stars, usually of the twenties ...”

“Barbra with her logorrhea expressed her opinions freely and endlessly about everyone and everything, including the technique of movie making,” Sharaff also wrote.

Streisand was mic’d for Funny Girl on the stage—which meant all of her costumes were fashioned with a small buttonhole for a microphone to poke through. Ray Diffen, who assisted Irene Sharaff on the Funny Girl costumes, wrote that “the aerial was wound around her body, the microphone was fixed to her bra and the battery pack was taped to her leg, or the small of her back. The battery pack then was quite unwieldy, as big as a packet of cigarettes.”

Diffen further explained the technology: “all [costumes] had a small buttonhole for the mic to poke through. This had to be found by the dresser, in the dark in a hurry. It was a nightmare! In Boston we lost three outfits that couldn't be changed in time.”

Diffen described the quick-change Streisand had to make during The Music That Makes Me Dance: “we had to rig up a long evening dress under a short fur coat of leopard skin. She had to step back through a curtain of fringe, unhook the coat, let the dress fall and step through the curtain and sing.”

BELOW:  Click to view the photo gallery of Irene Sharaff costume designs for Funny Girl.

In the evening's program for Barbra's 1969 salute at the Friar's Club, Isobel Lennart (pictured) composed a full-page tribute to working with Barbra on the show. Here's what she wrote:

“Did I have trouble with Barbra? Don’t ask!”

How would you like to write a libretto about a homely little girl, have what seemed to be a homely little girl engaged for the part —and then, the first time she has an audience — on opening night in Boston — have her turn beautiful in front of your eyes? And get more beautiful at every performance, so that — by opening time in New York — she’s obviously one of the great beauties of all time.

What do you think that did to all my ‘homely little girl’ jokes? And what about all the scenes explaining why the leading man fell in love with a homely little girl — how do you think they played to an audience in love with Barbra from the moment the curtain went up?

You’re right! I had to snip and shneid like a manic tailor! And that wasn’t all.

My other troubles with Barbra started quite soon after I met her — about ten minutes after.

It was my first show, so I was expecting trouble —from everyone but Barbra. A twenty-year-old kid, in her first starring part? Why, she’d be so happy to have it, so grateful, so overawed — there wouldn’t be a peep out of her that wasn’t thank you!

And here she was — pointing one of those mile-long fingers at a page in the libretto and saying “I liked your first version of this scene much better.”

Stalling while I thought up something devastating to say back, I glanced at the page. A minute later I put back the earlier version. Meekly. The twenty-year-old kid was right. And continued to be right, most of the time.

I was disarmed, and I don’t mean enchanted — I mean, without any armor. Without defences.

You can argue when an actor says “I hate this scene — it stinks.” But Barbra never did that. She just looked at the page and turned a delicate almond-green. And you can’t argue with green.

With some actors you can say: “You want a new scene? You don’t even know the old one, and you’ve had it for two months!” But how can you say that to Barbra? Get a new scene to her at two in the morning, and she’ll perform it perfectly the next night. I know. I did it for thirty nights in a row.

And then there’s the greatest of all writer gambits: “You don’t like that line? Fine! Write one yourself!”

I hate admitting publicly that I’m a coward, but I never — not once — dared say that to Barbra. I was too afraid that she could, that she would, and that it might — might, mind you — be a better line than mine.

Well — there it is. That’s the kind of trouble I had with Barbra. And if you’re a writer, it should only happen to you!

ISOBEL LENNART

"[Funny Girl] started my long relationship with Barbra Streisand, who’s recorded now six of the songs that Richard [Maltby] and I have written. It was so thrilling to hear Barbra Streisand sing ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ eight times a week. And she never, she rarely did it exactly the same way twice, which made it very challenging for those of us in the pit. Conducting with her was a little bit, you know, like a board game of some kind, ‘cause if you weren't right with her, you’d certainly get a note about it. But that song, which I believe has a range of something like an octave and a sixth, really shows off her voice and the tremendous range and power of it in all those ranges.”

David Shire also told writer Jennifer Ashley Tepper (Tales from the World's Most Famous Theaters, Volume 1) about his time conducting the show in the Funny Girl orchestra pit:

“After you play a show for a long time,” he explained, “you get so that you can almost play automatically. You know exactly when you need to get ready to play again, so in the meantime, you'd see a lot of magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks in the pit. And one day, one of the trombone players was reading Playboy. He was going through it, during a good part of "People."

“Barbra looked down and saw a centerfold unfolded in the pit. Immediately, we got a message that if Barbra ever saw anything like that distracting her from the stage, there would be no more reading in the pit. After that, everybody was a little more discreet.”

In August 1964, five months into the Funny Girl run, Sydney Chaplin gave an interview to the New York Post in which he expressed his frustration playing Nick Arnstein. "I'm sort of a nobody – a straight man for Barbra Streisand. I'm a guy in white tails, a snob – the audience doesn't root for me. And you can't write a good part when the character dosn't want something. What can you hope for Arnstein – that he doesn't ruffle his white shirt? At the end of the play I kick the dog, slap the baby – I leave Fanny. I'm lucky the audience doesn't wait outside the theater to lynch me."

The backstage battling of the two stars made the gossip columns, too. 

In June 1965, columnist Earl Wilson reported that Sydney Chaplin  was having “a row with the producers who got Actors Equity to invite him to a ‘friendly discussion’ meeting at Sardi’s where, I’m told, no charges were filed, though some in the cast were questioned about their, and his, performances. Barbra, incidentally, has at no time complained about Chaplin whose acting talent she vastly admires.”

Chaplin told one columnist in June, "I don't like [Ray] Stark and he doesn't like me."  Ray Stark replied, "There were problems with Chaplin which were brought before Actors Equity but could not be resolved. He is quite accurate when he says I do not like him and he doesn't like me."

What were the problems with Chaplin that caused Actors Equity to become involved?  "He would actually be talking to try to upstage her while she was singing 'People,'" said Linda Gerard, a cast member and eventual understudy for Streisand. "He would be doing things that were so ridiculous and so amateur-night-in-Dixie," she told writer James Spada.

The understudy for Nick, George Reeder, explained it more simply.  "It was a scorned affair," he said, "and they were at each other's throats."

Larry Fuller was  one of two assistants for Carol Haney on the show, as well as being dance captain. "Sydney was extremely angry at her. He'd grumble and say things behind the set about her as she waited to go on," Fuller told Spada. "I could quite often feel the tension onstage between them because his anger was so voluminous."  

A friend to both Chaplin and Streisand, Orson Bean offered a kinder explanation: "Once his numbers were cut and the show didn't need him as much, Sydney felt Barbra wasn't in love with him anymore," he told writer William Mann.

Finally, Chaplin left the show. Variety reported on June 23, "The actor withdrew last Saturday night (19) from his co-starring assignment in the Broadway production of Funny Girl after reaching a settlement with the management whereby he's to get $2,100 a week until expiration of his contract next April 1."  Variety pointed out that Chaplin's payoff amounted to $86,100, and Chaplin made sure to announce that his quarrel was with Ray Stark, not Barbra Streisand, even though everyone involved with the show knew the truth for his leaving.

George Reeder took over the role of Nick until Johnny Desmond was hired to take over.

Desmond told the Daily News Sun's Robert Wahls, "I flew in on July 1 after studying the script between [nightclub] shows in New Orleans." He was due to go on as Nick July 5, which made Streisand nervous, but he went on and she told him, "You didn't miss a line."

But Desmond was despondent over the amount of memos he was receiving from stage manager Tom Stone.  When he found out they were initiated from Streisand herself, Desmond asked for a meeting.  "We talked for two hours on stage and I told her I was happy in my work, that I was a hero to my wife and kids because I was playing opposite her. And I wanted a good working relationship. I couldn't steal the show from her if I stood on my head and yodeled and I don't want to even think in those terms or have anyone else think so."

Desmond finished the New York run of Funny Girl and even continued in the role when Mimi Hines took over the role of Fanny Brice.

"I've never heard [Fanny Brice] or seen her – I didn't even hear any of the 'Baby Snooks' radio shows. But I feel we have a lot in common," Barbra told The New York Times in March 1964. "When the show closes, that's when I'll listen to all her old records and radio tapes and see any movies she was in. But in the show, I approach the character as though she were not an actual person. I don't try to do an imitation of Fanny Brice, that would be like a nightclub act."

Streisand told AP writer William Glover a similar story: "I don't want to imitate anybody," she said. "My ego's too big.  Besides, this show is fate. The play is really about me. It simply happened to happen before to Fanny Brice. And anyway, it's fictionalized."

"I'm a human being, so therefore I have my good nights and my bad nights – when I'm feeling good, and feeling up and energetic, and when I'm feeling tired. Now when I'm feeling tired, it's a tiresome job.  This is a difficult part though – maintaining a spontaneous performance eight times a week.  Because you're taking a creative art and putting it into a mold, putting it into a bottle. I must say it's very difficult on two shows a day."

Streisand told The Sunday Bulletin, "The Wednesday matinee audience is usually the toughest. It's mostly ladies, and they come more to have a good time than to see the show. It's a little strange, all women. You need men in an audience.

"Saturday, matinee is the best audience of all. There are both men and women, and they're seeing the show at half price and you get double the laughter. When I was a kid, I always saved my money until I could afford to buy an orchestra seat at a Saturday matinee—it was the only time I could afford to sit in the orchestra."

Streisand described working on the show in a 1977 interview with Playboy magazine:

"When I started to rehearse the play Funny Girl, for several months it was great fun. I would eat these huge Chinese meals right before I would go on stage. The more they changed the scenes, the more I liked it. The more I had different songs to try out, the more I loved it. We had 41 different last scenes, the last one being frozen only on opening night. Forty-one versions of a last scene! That was always exciting, stimulating. But once they froze the show, I felt like I was locked up in prison. I couldn't stand it anymore. I could hardly even get through the performances. That's what drove me into analysis: Funny Girl on the stage. No one knows the truth about it. I was on Donnatal [a prescription drug] ... To control my stomach. I was frightened. I was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week, or something like that. I thought, What do people expect of me? They hadn't seen me, but they'd heard of me. I felt the pressure. Enormous pressure. I had a big calendar; I would cross off the days. After 18 months, all I wanted was out, out, out."

Streisand, of course, went on to perform Funny Girl in London – part of her deal with Ray Stark to play Fanny in the film version.

In 1991, Barbra wrote: “We played almost 1,000 performances on Broadway, out-of-town and in London. Obsessed with sustaining the quality of the production, I gave notes after every performance (including closing night)...If our energy was slipping, if the music was sloppy, if a prop was dirty, I'd make a note of it.”

PHOTO: Streisand poses in her paisley-patterned dressing room at the Winter Garden Theatre.

SLIDESHOW BELOW: Click the arrows to navigate through slides of Streisand backstage in her dressing room, and also arriving at the stage door of the WInter Garden Theatre.

In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, director Garson Kanin spoke about directing Streisand in Funny Girl.  "She could sing, she learned to dance and she was good in the serious stuff.  Barbra had everything but elegance.  Elegance is making an art out of life.  Fanny Brice had elegance."

Kanin worked with Streisand on the elegance he wanted for the role.  "It penetrated," he said. "She had more dignity, human nobility, self-respect and respect for the audience. She left off all the common and cheap effects and was on the road."

Kanin, of course, was replaced by Jerome Robbins, who led the Funny Girl cast and crew to its Broadway premiere. "I sensed something was wrong," Kanin told writer René Jordan. "My agent called me and said Stark thought he was on the verge of one of the biggest hits ever but that everyone was so fixed in his position that nobody was budging an inch. The time had come for a fresh eye. I said nothing was more welcome, depending on who it was. When I heard it was Jerome Robbins, I said it was a sensational idea.  The only thing I ever objected to was a codirector credit for Robbins because it would not have been fair. He had worked on the show for only a few weeks, but I'd done all the casting, the basic work. I was given full credit as a director in posters, programs, everything, and Robbins was listed as a production supervisor."  

Make sure you read all about Garson Kanin's 1980 novel, Smash, which was a not-so-subtle tale about taking a big musical show to Broadway.  Peter Filichia wrote a great article about it at Playbill's website.

PHOTO:  Garson Kanin, right, in front of his cast:  Allyn Ann McLerie, Sydney Chaplin, and Streisand.

Despite Funny Girl’s final credits, it’s well known that Jerome Robbins was the de facto director of the show — especially when he swooped in at the last minute and saved it before its Broadway opening.

Jerome Robbins wrote this piece for the October 1966 issue of McCall's Magazine.

Barbra: Some Notes

Consider Her: A tug-of-war goes on in all departments.

The kook's looks are ravishing. Her beauty astounds, composed of impossibly unconventional features. Her movements are wildly bizarre and completely elegant. Her body is full of gawky angles and sensuous curves. It scrunches, elongates and turns on in spotlights. Her El Greco hands have studied Siamese dancing and observed the antennae of insects. She flings gestures about, sprinkling the air with outrageous patterns, but every movement is a totally accurate composition in space.

Her cool is as strong as her passion. The child is also the Woman. The first you want to protect; the second, keep. She comes on with defiant independence —yet communicates an urgent need for both admiration and approval. She laughs at sexiness. She is sexy. She tests you with childish stubbornness, impetuosity and conceit, concedes you are right without admission, and balances all with her generous artistry and grace. Fighting is fun; losing, a camp; winning, the best.

At Rehearsal: An untiring, tenacious worker.

She is jet-fueled with the robust, all-daring energy of an ambitious theater novice, which is tempered by the taste, instinct and delicacy of a sensitive theater veteran. At rehearsals, she often arrives late, haphazardly dressed in no-nonsense clothes, her hair shoved up under a cap. She accepts the twelve pages of new material to go in that evening's performance and pores over them while schnorring part of your sandwich and someone else's Coke. She reads, and, like an instantaneous translator, she calculates how all the myriad changes will affect the emotional and physical patterns, blocking, costumes, exits and entrances, etc. When she finishes reading, her reactions are immediate and violent—loving or hating them—and she will not change her mind. Not that day. During the rehearsal, in her untidy, exploratory, meteoric fashion, she goes way out, never afraid to let herself go anywhere or try anything. Nor can she be pinned down. And in the few hours' rehearsals, she has probed into and examined what she must do, but what will happen onstage is being studied behind her eyes and in her nerves. That night onstage, in place of the messy, grubby girl, a sorceress sails through every change without hesitation, leaving wallowing fellow players in her wake.

Onstage: Witchcraft.

She always surprises. Her performances astound, arouse, fulfill. When she sings, she is as honest and frighteningly direct with her feelings as if one time she was, is or will be in bed with you. The satisfaction she gives also leaves one with terrible and pleasurable hunger. For what will become of this woman? She is still unfinished. Where will she go and what will she do? With all her talent and radiance, glamour, uniqueness, passion and wit and spontaneity, she is still forming. There is more to come, things will change, something will happen. The next is not going to be like the last; she promises more and more surprises. Thus she adds the special mystery to her already extraordinary gifts and achieves the true sign of a star. She is one of those very rare and fascinating performers who spellbind and then irresistibly pull you on to find out what will happen in the next moment, the next act, the next play.

This sphinx-enigma will change and alter—metamorphize. You will want to know her future, where her youthful talent and success will take her and what her life will become. She will tell. She is alike on and off the stage.

Modern audiences know Lainie Kazan as Maria Portokalos, the mother of Toula Portokalos (Nia Vardalos) in the films My Big Fat Greek Wedding and its sequel. Kazan also portrayed Aunt Frieda on the Fran Drescher sitcom The Nanny.

But back in 1964-65, Kazan had the ungrateful job of Barbra Streisand's understudy on Funny Girl.  For two hours a week, Kazan was required to participate in understudy rehearsals, usually with associate music director Peter Daniels. 

"There are things Barbra does in the show that I don't agree with for me," Kazan told journalist Jorie Lueloff. "My idea of the part and my interpretation would have been different, because I'm a different person. But as her understudy, I have to get the same result she does, although I don't have to go about it in the same way."

Kazan explained that "Right now it's not my part. I'm not saying I couldn't make it my part, but an understudy can't really create very much. And with all the rewriting that's been done since the original script, the part has been written around Barbra and the dialogue written to suit her and her talent."

Kazan also began dating Peter Daniels – Streisand's accompanist from her early nightclub days. "Peter was supposedley on HER team, and at that time I was too stupid to realize it. I was now mad for the man," Kazan told Anne Edwards. 

PHOTO:  Kazan brazenly posed in costume as Fanny Brice when she was interviewed for an AP Newsfeatures story about her.

Edward Feldman, who handled advertising and publicity for the run of Funny Girl, described what happened next in his memoir:

" ... the stage manager gets word that Streisand is very ill and will not make the evening performance.  So we tell her standby, Lainie Kazan, to get ready to go on ... Kazan makes the mistake of getting her agent to contact the press so they will turn out to see her as Fanny Brice.

"So, while Kazan is warming up to sing 'People,' the word gets back to Streisand about Kazan's PR efforts ... That night, Streisand drags herself to the theater and goes on. She made it through the performance but she wasn't up to par. She really was sick."

On Wednesday, February 3, 1965, with Streisand's voice out of commission from singing the night before, Kazan went on for Streisand at the matinee and evening  shows.   "There were 279 ticket refunds at the sold-out Winter Garden, which holds 1,580," reported the New York Daily News.

"The next morning," Kazan related, "all these great notices appeared in the press, and late that day I learned that Pater had been fired; he and Barbra had had an angry confrontation."

Kazan was also fired (although she denies it). Actress Linda Gerard took over as Streisand's understudy.  Gerard got along much better with Streisand. "We confided in each other, we were buddies," she told René Jordan. "She was the most cooperative of performers. Every time she introduced new business into the show, she would tell me to watch it so that I would be perfect when I went on."

Years after this behind-the-scenes drama was over, Kazan told The New York Times in 1992, "We were both young women fighting for a piece of the sky, and she had the shot that I wanted. So, of course, there was envy and resentment. Barbra didn't want me to take over. Now, well, we're not friends, but we communicate. When my husband, Peter Daniels, died three years ago -- he was her associate musical director in 'Funny Girl' -- she called and sent flowers and sounded wonderful."

There was a group of young theater fans who saw Funny Girl hundreds of times – they called themselves the Winter Garden Kids and they noticed that Barbra was running shorter versions of the show after its first year.

One of these fans recalled, “We had many adventures with Barbra, Elliott, Roslyn [Kind], and Diana [Kind]. The group saw hundreds of performances of Funny Girl.”

18-year-old David Sherman was one of the Kids and was quoted in the New York Times Magazine: “I feel we are a part of the most important theater history of our time. One day I will take out an old corroded Playbill and I will be able to say, ' I saw her in Funny Girl.' It's like my mother always saying, 'I saw Laurette in The Glass Menagerie.'”

As the first year of Funny Girl came to a close, Barbra's theater groupies noticed that Streisand started performing shorter versions of the show for audiences.

Because Wednesdays were two-show days, “Wednesday matinees were the shortest performances,” one fan told Barbra Archives, “with the least amount of material. Barbra cut the second choruses of most of her numbers. (e.g. ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ ended with ‘Hey Mr. Arnstein here I am!’).”  For the shortest version of the show, Barbra also made small changes like cutting the intro of "Cornet Man." 

These changes never altered the spine or the basic essence of the show; mostly, they cut an extra 10-15 minutes off of an already 2-1/2 hour musical, allowing the hard-working cast and crew to get home a little earlier.

Broadway figure Seth Rudetsky confirmed this when he interviewed dancer/choreographer Bob Avian, who was a swing dancer in Funny Girl.  Rudetsky wrote that “in order to preserve her voice/energy, [Barbra] would do an ‘A’ version of the show, a ‘B’ version and a ‘C’ version. Meaning she would modify the songs. [Avian} remembers hearing the announcement backstage that would signal it was going to be the ‘C’ version, a.k.a., most extreme version: ‘Attention cast. At this performance, Barbra will not be performing ‘Who Are You Now?’’ Yes, she would cut the entire song during certain performances!”

Streisand's proclivity to shortening the show was not without historical precedence. For instance, Cy Coleman explained to writer Robert Viagas how Broadway star Gwen Verdon used to cut the song "Where Am I Going?" from Sweet Charity. "Our leading lady, Gwen Verdon, wanted to cut the number because she said she was already dancing too much and was too tired ... She used to cut it sometimes.  She would just decide not to do it that day.  What were we going to do? Fire Gwen Verdon? "

One of the Winter Garden Kids recalled that on closing night Barbra “did the full show, with more emotion than she had on opening night.”

"In her last three months with the show, her mind was elsewhere," said Linda Gerard, her understudy. "She was involved with her records, she was preparing her second television show, she was going to take Funny Girl to London next April. I got to play the part about eighteen times in that period."

Barbra's final performance of the Broadway production of Funny Girl was Sunday, December 25, 1965. During that show Barbra broke down and cried while singing “People.”

Barbra told Gene Shalit in 1983, “Closing night of Funny Girl, I was standing on the stage singing ‘People’ for the last time and I broke down. I was overwhelmed by emotion. I don't know where it came from, it was somewhere deep in my unconscious. And I realized how much feeling I had towards that song.”

As a tribute to Fanny Brice, she sang “My Man” to the audience after the final bows.  The audience and cast returned the favor by singing "Auld Lang Syne" to her.  Both can be heard on Barbra's 1991 CD retrospective Just For the Record.

Funny Girl ran for another year and a half with Mimi Hines portraying Fanny. (Her real-life husband, Phil Ford, joined the cast as Eddie Ryan). Hines remembered some of her time in Funny Girl with writer David Noh:

"Jule [Styne] had told me and Phil about the show two years before, when he came to see us in the Catskills, saying I’d be perfect for it. Then Barbra came along and she was absolutely perfect because visually she had a resemblance to Fanny, with a lovely success already in ‘I Can Get it for You Wholesale,’ a hit record, so it went right to her, of course. I never dreamed it would be such a success.

“I met Barbra years before when she worked with Liberace, but she doesn’t remember that. That’s okay. I used to see her pop in and get ready for the matinee, stand in the wings for a few seconds, and then she’d disappear. When I opened in the show, she left me a giant blue marble egg, quite lovely.”

Hines and the Funny Girl cast even moved to a new theater. On March 14, 1966, Funny Girl moved from Broadway's Winter Garden to the Majestic on West 44th.

The Broadway production of Funny Girl finally closed July 1, 1967. Variety reported its 1,348-performance run earned an estimated $1,200,000 profit on its initial $450,000 investment.

Hines and Ford subsequently opened an edited, one-hour version of the show at Las Vegas' Riviera Hotel.

For a national tour, Marilyn Michaels performed Fanny and Anthony George was Nick.  Barbra's former Wholesale costar Lillian Roth joined as Mrs. Brice; and The Jeffersons' Isabell Sanford portrayed Emma.

Michaels wrote an article for the New York Times in 2011 in which she recalled, "In 1965, when the composer Jule Styne ran up to me onstage at the Winter Garden Theater during auditions for the national company of  Funny Girl and exclaimed, 'You must do this part!,'  he saw qualities in me that any actress playing Fanny Brice must have to make the role believable."

The tour of Funny Girl made news when, in Denver, the tour's producer insisted the lyrics to “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” be changed from “Private Schwartz from Rockaway” to “Private Flynn from Brook-a-lyn” for fear that West Coast audiences would deem the lyrics anti-Semitic.

While the Broadway and tour versions of Funny Girl continued, Streisand had moved with the show to London in 1966.

PHOTOS BELOW:  Marilyn Michaels as the touring Fanny Brice; Johnny Desmond and Mimi Hines starred in Funny Girl after Streisand left the show.