The Girl

"Barbra Streisand crosses the stage, stopping in the center to gaze out over the audience, her look preoccupied. She gives a shrug and goes off. This wordless vignette is her first entrance and exit in Broadway's new musical, Funny Girl.... Funny Girl is a biographical evening about the late Fanny Brice, and ostensibly Barbra Streisand is re-creating her rise to fame and her ill-starred marriage to Nicky Arnstein, the gambler-sport. But Streisand establishes more than a well recollected Fanny Brice. She establishes Barbra Streisand. When she is on stage, singing, mugging, dancing, loving, shouting, wiggling, grinding, wheedling, she turns the air around her into a cloud of tired ions. Her voice has all the colors, bright and subtle, that a musical play could ask for, and gradations of power too. It pushes the walls out, and it pulls them in."