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Why the FUNNY GIRL tour casting is disappointing... | The argument for authenticity behind the drama
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Mickey Jo
Today's weather forecast unfortunately predicts a 100% chance that I will be raining on somebody's parade. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. If you're meeting me for the first time, my name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional critic and a pundit, living in the UK but working internationally. I talk about what's going on in the West End, I talk about what's going on on Broadway, which is why I am making today's video. Also, because a couple of people in my comment section have requested that I talk about this. So I thought, let's do it. I want to make it super up front that I am a white non Jewish British male. Mine is not the prevalent voice in this discussion and I'm not making this video to try and take up space or be the loudest voice in this conversation. But I have a platform and a presence on a social media platform that is pretty underutilized. There aren't that many theatre YouTubers. A lot of this discourse is happening on Twitter where there are some brilliant Jewish voices having this conversation. A lot of this discourse is happening on Instagram, on TikTok, where there are brilliant Jewish voices having this conversation. I am bringing that here to YouTube. But you can go and see the stories that Talia Siskawa is posting. You can go and see the TikToks that my good friend Ashley Hufford is posting. You can go and read the amazing Twitter thread that Ben Lebofsky has posted. There are some brilliant resources that I will do my best to link you to in the comments and descriptions down below for some brilliant takes on this. I just want to kind of uplift and support and endorse, but mine is not still the most important voice in this conversation. That being said, I will do my best to let you know what is going on, why there is controversy here, give you a little bit of context to it, and give you my take on the situation. Also, secondary disclaimer, if you can notice the camera wobbling, you're balanced on a bin, on a suitcase, on a bed, in a hotel room in Manchester. Because I am traveling the country at the moment seeing theatre, which is a lot of fun, but it does lead to precarious setups such as this one. If you fall at any point during this filming, I apologize. I'm trying not to gesture too wildly because it is making the whole thing slide slightly. So I'm going to talk about this at length in the video, but here is the Long and short of it, which is Funny Girl has just announced their casting for the U.S. tour. They've announced a handful of roles, but among that they've also announced the newcomer performer who will be playing the role of Fanny Brice. Fanny Brice, who is based on a real life Jewish person and whose cultural Jewishness is pretty intrinsic to her characterization and her depiction within the show. And the performer in question, who has been announced is a Cuban American performer who is not themselves Jewish. So why does it matter that a non Jew is playing this Jewish role? Aren't actors just supposed to be actors? Why is this taking on such a significance? Why are people mad about this? Is this in line with what the show has done before? And why is this just the latest in a series of casting controversies happening around Funny Girl? We're going to discuss all of that in today's video. If you enjoy this one or you want to see more like this video, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel where there will be more news, features, opinion pieces, interviews, reviews and all sorts of stagey content. For now, let's wade into the controversial casting of the U.S. tour of Funny Girl. So Funny Girl, originally produced with Barbra Streisand in the leading role, she was not the first choice for this production. I believe it was originally meant to be Carol Burnett, who is a non Jewish performer. Fun fact. It became iconic. She became iconic. It became inextricably linked to her. It was adapted for film, the film got a sequel, and it hasn't been seen on broad Broadway since until a revival opened post Pandemic. Now, in the years between Funny Girl's two stints on Broadway, it's been produced extensively regionally with many Jewish actresses playing the role. Now, when this revival opened, it opened with a star name, but not a star name anyone was expecting. It opened with Beanie Feldstein, a bona fide screen actress who had been recently seen in the Broadway revival of hello Dolly and a Jewish performer. But when the show opened, Beanie drew a lot of criticism from audiences and critics alike for not really having the powerhouse vocals that anyone was expecting in the wake of Barbra Streisand's legendary performance. Beanie's casting as a Jewish actress, who above all else was very funny in the role seemed discernibly to be a move towards authenticity by these producers. It seemed as though they were going away from the sort of the big belting impression of the character and going back to something a little bit more sincere. That, however, didn't work. It didn't work for audiences, it didn't work for critics, and before too long the show is in financial trouble. In the meantime, understudy Julie Benger, who ended up becoming an alternate and briefly taking over after Beanie left the production early, which is a whole other drama and controversy that I've covered in previous videos. She was also a Jewish performer and was also very funny according to audiences, and was capable of delivering the powerhouse vocals that everyone was expecting when they wanted to hear people or don't rain in my parade, Belt it out of the park. Ultimately, the producers decided to bring in another star, a more viably commercial star with the big voice. We are talking about Lea Michele. Now, Lea Michele does have a tangible relationship to her Jewish culture and identity. Her father was Jewish. She said in interviews that she's a little bit separated from her Judaism, but that's not really. Certainly the religious aspect of it is not the primary concern here. I'll talk more about that in the next section. But in any case, she was not a non Jewish actress, and to my knowledge, none of the understudies for the role have been either. Now, when the casting corps went out for the US tour, we have now seen on screenshots that they were actively seeking Jewish performers to play the role of Fanny Brice. Lo and behold, the actress cast in the role whose name is Katerina McCrinnan. She is a Cuban American performer from Miami, and from what has now emerged online, she is not Jewish. This has been confirmed by people who know her personally at the time of me filming this. She has yet to make any kind of a public statement addressing the controversy of her casting. But that's a really weird position for her to be in. You know, you audition for this dream role, you get offered this dream role, this dream role gets announced. It should be a great day for you. And there's all of this backl I appreciate it's a horrible position to be in. At the same time, I do also question auditioning for said role when the audition specifically calls for actresses of Jewish heritage, and that same production has only ever cast Jewish actresses in the role. That's the part where I get to be just a little bit less sympathetic. I also question the producers who would actively state they are looking for Jewish actresses and then fully cast someone who is not. And please do not try and comment beneath this video and tell me that there is any kind of a shortage of talented young Jewish actresses working in the US because that's simply factually inaccurate. Interestingly enough, though, all of this Dialogue is concerned around Fanny. Her mother is another Jewish character depicted in the show, Mrs. Bryce. And when the revival originally opened, Jane lynch was playing the role, not a Jewish actress. She also came under a certain amount of criticism, admittedly not as much as Beanie. And her first replacement was Tove Feldsher, who is a Jewish actress. Now, this same US tour has announced that the Grammy Award winning singer Melissa Manchester, who gave us the hit record Don't Cry Out Loud, will be playing the role of Mrs. Bryce. Now, I'm given to understand that Melissa Manchester is Jewish and has a strong relationship to Jewish heritage and Jewish culture, which, if anything, makes the casting of Fanny Brice more conspicuous by contrast. So why does all of this matter? I can already hear the comments that I'm inevitably going to get on this video. Anytime I talk about authenticity in casting, people mistake it for me talking about exactness in casting. And I appreciate that. Acting is acting. It's an act of transformation. And there are sticky conversations to be had around casting sexuality in roles and casting cultural heritage in roles. We have come a long way in realizing that blackface isn't okay and that shows like Hairspray and Ragtime need to be cast appropriately and correctly when they're talking about race. But where people can see race and people unfortunately have this habit of classifying human beings and performers by extension by their race and seeing someone as a black actor or an Asian actor, people aren't so good at seeing the value of heritage and someone's ability to bring their cultural heritage and cultural insight to a role. Just because you can't see someone's Jewishness doesn't mean it isn't informing their performance with an authenticity and with an honesty and a truth that is ultimately going to make it a much better performance. Like I said, it's a difficult conversation. But let me spell it out really neatly here. The role of Fanny Brice is intrinsically very Jewish. There's a lyric where she sings, who's an American Beauty rose with 10American Beauty toes and an American Beauty nose that relates to her taking ownership of harmful anti Semitic tropes. So many of her line readings and her jokes are riddled with Yiddish inflections. There's just so much of her Jewish culture within the fabric of her character. It's inextricable. So there's no real way of playing the role and not playing her Jewishness, at which point you're playing a caricature of Jewishness if you're not doing it with some kind of honesty and authenticity. And shows can bring in dialect coaches and shows can bring in, like, cultural officers and people whose role it is to ensure that those things are done legitimately and authentically and realistically. And if you think of all of this as just a splashy entertainment that costs a lot of money that you can go and see on a Friday night, then fine, then that probably makes a lot of sense to you. But if you think of the theatre as I do, as storytelling, then Fanny Brice's story is really a story that a Jewish performer ought to be able to tell. A Jewish performer who's grown up with those same vulnerabilities and comes from the same place that Fanny Brice comes from is automatically going to give you a stronger, more authentic performance. I cannot say the word authentic enough in this video. I don't need it to be reality. I know that people are acting on stage, but authenticity is what informs terrific performance. I also think where a lot of the material involves the other characters poking fun at Fanny and where she's kind of mocked lightly for a lot of her appearance and her tendencies and her mannerisms, if a performer who is non Jewish were playing that, it would feel like a harmful stereotype. It would feel derogatory and it would. Wouldn't feel like she was in on the joke in the same way. Now, let's discuss where this has happened elsewhere and if there's any precedent for this kind of an idea. Are other shows taking it upon themselves to only cast Jewish performers in Jewish roles? Well, we've seen both sides of this. We've seen the shows that have something like Leopoldstadt cast a great many Jewish actors on Broadway. Over in the West End, the current revival of Cabaret has been very careful to only cast Jewish actors in the role of Herr Schultz, who in Pre World War II Germany, it's so important. Like his Jewishness is so important to his character arc. But going back a few years, we have things like a London revival of Falsettos that had no Jewish creatives and no Jewish performers whatsoever. And so nobody within that rehearsal space with any kind of a link to Jewish culture and no understanding. And the Jewish creatives who were critical of this and then went to see the show pointed out a great many shortcomings in the depiction of Jewish faith, which in a show like Falsetto's, is everywhere. It is all about that culture and that faith. So it does happen, and it is beginning to happen. And I don't want us to move towards this place of people only being able to play roles within the narrow frame of their own lived experience. But where you have performers who have been marginalised for whatever reason, as non white performers tend to be when it comes to playing traditionally white roles, as non thin performers tend to be when it comes to playing traditionally thin roles, as non straight performers tend to be when it comes to playing traditionally straight roles, it hurts when those same performers then aren't allowed to play their own lived experience, when they're not allowed to play their own backgrounds, their own body types. When you have traditionally fat roles understudied by thin performers, where you have traditionally PoC characters understudied by white performers, where you have gay roles played by straight actors, when those gay actors aren't allowed to play the straight roles either. This is the issue. Until we have a completely open door approach in casting, we're gonna have to highlight these inconsistencies. And I know there are a lot of people who will just say, let the most talented person in. But there are a wealth of talented people when it comes to casting. It is not a numerical approach, like here is 1 to 10 of most talented to least talented. There are so many options in the mix. They consider so many different things. They're thinking about how people are going to look in the costumes, they're thinking about how marketable people are, they're thinking about how they play with other members of the cast. And at this point when casting like this happens, all it shows us is that that creative team does not value cultural insight and cultural heritage and authenticity as high as how that performer is going to look on posters, how marketable they are, and whether they have believable chemistry with the person that they're on stage with. That argument also implies that there aren't talented people of the correct ethnicity, of the correct cultural background, which is in itself super offensive. Also, the people who are insisting we need this completely open door approach to casting right now, who think everything should be open to everyone, they're almost always saying that to advocate on behalf of a white performer having an opportunity that they've already had. And I acknowledge that. The performer in question in this video, who I don't want to attack personally, because at the end of the day, she's just auditioning for a dream role and she got the dream role. I've talked about this before, I acknowledge she's a Cuban American performer. And had she been a Cuban American performer who was also Jewish, which is a thing that happens, this would be fantastic. This would be a breakthrough moment in casting. And it's a shame that we can't take this opportunity to celebrate a Cuban American performer getting to play the role of Fanny Brice because unfortunately the Jewishness is still super important here and the erasure of that Jewishness is not excused by the uplifting of another minority group. If I didn't know any better, it kind of feels like a creative team who are looking at performers and putting them into a box that is some type of ethnic and the creative team aren't discerning the differences between those individuals. But those have been my thoughts about this Funny Girl tour casting drama. Like I said, there are a great many other people who have said fantastic things about this on other social media platforms. I will link you to them down below. I do not need for mine to be the loudest voice about this. Mine is not the most important, important voice, but I do think it's important to talk about these issues. I've spoken about this show and it's casting a lot because it keeps coming up. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what I want to happen. I would be very curious to hear from Katarina, the performer who has been cast in this role. I'd be very curious to hear from the producers and the creative team to learn a little bit more about their insight. They must have expected this when this casting announcement was going to come out. Given their recent history with so dedicatedly casting Jewish performers, they must have known there was going to be backlash to this. So I think it was a bit short sighted not to have this accompanied by any kind of a statement about her talent. I don't know. We will see how all of this evolves. Of course, I am expecting there are going to be many comments on this video. Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts down below. Everyone is entitled to an opinion about this. Please just keep it respectful and please do consider what I said. And please don't imply that what I've said here is that people can only play their exact selves on stage. That is not what I've said. That's not what I have ever said. And there is considerably more nuance to this argument than that. Thank you for watching today's video. I hope that you've enjoyed if you did and you want to see more videos like this, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel where there will be more reviews, theatre news, features, interviews, opinions and lots more stagey content. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo, theatre oh my God. Hey, thanks for watch a Stagey day. Subscribe.