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Third on Robbins' list: “Barbra Streisman.” Jerome Robbins' papers reveal an early list (circa 1962) of actresses he considered to play Fanny Brice: Chita Rivera, Tammy Grimes, Judy Holliday, Paula Prentiss, Suzanne Pleshette, Mimi Hines, Kaye Stevens, Eydie Gormé/Steve Lawrence.I collaborated on the script and the music and lyrics from March 26, 1962, when I went to the coast and spent a week there until Septem Over this period some of the time was spent very continuously from day to day working with Isobel Lennart or with Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, and sometimes even in consultation with Ray Stark.” Jerome Robbins, according to his papers ( Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.Stark hired the Gypsysongwriting team: Jule StyneĪnd Stephen Sondheim. Stark asked Lennart to write the Broadway book and Stark aligned himself with Broadway producer David Merrick to bring the story to the stage first, as a musical.
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After producing the stage-to-screen adaptation of The World of Suzie Wong, Stark believed his Fanny Brice film should take the same route. In the early 1960's, Ray Stark hired Ben Hecht, then later three-time Academy Award nominee Isobel Lennart to write screenplays about Fanny Brice's life.Pictured: An Al Hirschfeld illustration of Streisand in the mirror loooking at the real Fanny Brice. That is why we are here now, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, direction by Garson Kanin and choreography by Carol Haney. But as the years passed and the motion picture business changed, I became interested in the stage, and I proved to myself with a couple of ventures that doing something first in the theater was a wonderful testing ground of material for an eventual film. In a 1964 interview, Ray Stark explained: “ script was wonderful. Stark bought out all future rights from anyone who had worked on the material, including the earlier writers whose treatments had already been rejected. To protect her image from any possible abuses, Mr. Her third husband, the showman Billy Rose, wrote a story about her entitled "A Girl Called Fanny" that was published in McCall’s Magazine, and a record album in which singer-comedienne Kaye Ballard re-created Fanny Brice’s famous songs was enjoying great popularity.īeing married to Fanny Brice’s daughter, Ray Stark also had to retain firm control over the story so that none of its show business presentations could offend her heirs. There seemed to be a good deal of interest in Fanny Brice’s colorful life and career.
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Stark had previously commissioned treatments of life from Ben Hecht and from Henry and Phoebe Ephron. After Fanny's death, I kept on planning to do a film about her some day, and finally I got Isobel Lennart, one of the top screenwriters, to undertake the script.” So, you can see this has been a long-range proposition with me more than 10 years. One suggestion in those years was Judy Garland. “We'd bring up various names of film actresses who could play her role. “We used to discuss doing a motion picture about her career,” Stark said. It was his dream to make a musical about his mother-in-law’s life story. It was not that she spoke about being Jewish or made speeches about Jewish pride, it was that her Jewish background influenced her behavior on stage, and sprinkling her act with a few Yiddish phrases here and there cemented that persona.Was married to Fanny Brice's daughter, Frances (or Fran). Her act was Jewish, her persona Jewish, she was outwardly Jewish in ways that many Jewish entertainers are still afraid to be today. No one who saw Fanny Brice perform mistook her for an Irish Catholic. Many people have written how she broke barriers for female comedians and how she broke the barrier of having to look a certain way to be successful, but there was another barrier she broke as well–she made it okay to be unapologetically Jewish. From 1910-1930, under the name Fanny Brice, she was a sensation with the Ziegfield Follies, the pinnacle of entertainment in those days. But who was Fanny Brice?įania Borach was born October 29, 1891. The theater world is burning with excitement over the news that Funny Girl, the musical that made Barbra Streisand a household name fifty-eight years ago, is having its first revival ever, with Beanie Feldstein playing the role of Fanny Brice.