Funny Girl is based on the life and career of Jewish
vaudevillian comedian
Fanny Brice (1891–1951) and her romantic relationship with
gambler Nick Arnstein. Born to Jewish immigrants living in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Brice rose from the tenements via the Ziegfeld Follies to succeed as a stage, radio, and film performer. Her relationship with Arnstein, whom she married, has been described as "doomed." In the original production, Brice was portrayed by
Barbra Streisand. It ran for 1,348 performances and catapulted Streisand to fame. It also earned her a
Tony Award nomination. Both Brice and Streisand became
cultural icons, and Streisand's success on stage and screen as a funny woman overshadowed Lennart's achievement. Nonetheless, Lennart's successful introduction of a funny female Jewish character to the Broadway stage opened doors for other "talented, confident, funny [female characters] in a room full of men," according to theater scholar and director Barrie Gelles, who researches the intersection of Broadway musicals and Jewish identity. Lennart wrote the book for the
Broadway musical
Funny Girl, meaning that she wrote the
dialogue, created the story, crafted the structure, and developed the characters.
Jule Styne wrote the original music and
Bob Merrill wrote the original lyrics. Unsurprisingly, as Lennart recounted, she first wrote her story of Fanny Brice's life in screenplay form. "
Vincent J. Donehue, the [theater and film] director, read some pages at my home in
Malibu one day and went wild about them. He called
Mary Martin and later
Ray Stark, and the thing just snowballed. Ray wanted me to do it as a play and I agreed just to please him. Well, not altogether. My vanity entered into it; I didn't want anyone else messing around with my idea." Lennart, the only member of the creative team present from concept to end result, outlasted others who left or were let go, including theater director
Jerome Robbins. When Robbins wanted to fire Lennart, Stark fired him instead.
Funny Girl was the highest grossing film of 1968. In 2022
Funny Girl had its first
revival on Broadway, with
Beanie Feldstein playing the
lead. In the modern era, Fanny's professional savvy bumps up hard against her romantic sentimentality, although even the original production was criticized for its sentimentality by
Howard Taubman, the
New York Times theater reviewer then. For the revival,
Harvey Fierstein was brought in to revise the book, but critical reception found the same weaknesses as before. However, prior to the Broadway revival, according to Fierstein, pre-
pandemic productions of his revised version were successful in London theaters and on tour. ==Association with the Communist Party==