Word: starke
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Producer Ray Stark was feeling his way and burning his fingers on almost everything he touched. A fabulously successful film producer (Seven Arts Productions), he had never before done a Broadway show. Furthermore his wife Frances is the daughter of Fanny Brice and Nicky Arnstein. So there were book problems right away. The actual Nicky was considered unacceptable as a leading man. He was a shiftless con man with a column of mercury for a spine, a criminal record, and a cavalier attitude toward Fanny's devotion and fidelity...
...metaphor. His shoe trees were casts that had been made from his feet, and he described himself as distingue. W. C. Fields modeled his style, his speech and his manner after Nicky Arnstein. Something quite approximate to the real Nicky might have cured the flaws in Funny Girl. Instead, Stark settled for a paraffin prince out of Franz Lehar, who only turns to fraud out of temporary insanity arising from his embarrassment over accepting handouts from Fanny. Hence Barbra Streisand has no competition on the stage. A fight to the death with a more vigorous Nicky, given plenty of songs...
...Sounds. While Ray Stark was worrying about these things, Funny Girl opened in Boston and bombed. Writer Isobel Lennart began rewriting, Composer Jule Styne wrote twice as many songs as were finally used, and on the road $30,000 worth of sets were thrown away. Isobel Lennart wrote 42 versions of the last scene alone. The cost of the show eventually climbed beyond $600,000. The date of its New York opening was changed four times. Five weeks before the New York opening, Garson Kanin was no longer directing, and Jerome Robbins...
...acting is beautiful. Director Jerzy Kawalerowicz won an award at Cannes for this--probably for its stark dramatic power. Scenes like the exorcism in church, the flaring up of Joan's devils, the meeting of priest and rabbi, and the final communion of the two nuns are breathtaking. Joan's face particularly reveals the torments of a soul, but all the characters are washed over with the abstractness of a medieval morality play...
...SILENCE. The aberrations of two strange sisters dominate Ingmar Bergman's stark, savage but cold-blooded drama, in which both mind and body struggle to find meaning...