I’ve seen her in” - then she rattled off more concerts and performances than my gin-and-tonic-addled brain could count. She’d recently left the city for Boston but bought tickets “within ten seconds of the casting announcement.” I asked why she came: “I’ve been a Lea fan since I was 7 there was no way I was missing this. (Earlier in the show, when Fanny’s mother assures her she’ll “slay” her audition, this same woman snapped her fingers and whispered, “ Slay!”) I turned around and introduced myself to the finger-snapper: 21-year-old Sophie, who’d mastered the art of quietly commenting to her friend without being totally distracting. “I didn’t realize she was so funny,” a young woman behind me squealed during intermission. Michele has made “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” perhaps one of the dullest numbers in musical comedy, a near-showstopper and resuscitated this problem of a book by sheer personality. You smile along because they’re solidly built, and the faint echo of a laugh from 1964 kind of holds up. Most of the show’s jokes and songs (God bless them all) are “funny” but not funny. Her Fanny is lovable and utterly sincere but knows she’s pushy and demands the attention her talent deserves. Rather, she’s leaning into what we know about her and what she’s come to accept about herself: the “edge” she told the New York Times she possesses. She’s not doing the note-by-note Barbra imitation she performed as Rachel Berry on Glee, nor is she going out of her way to “rediscover” the character. Michele at least read the book of slay and turned the worst show on Broadway into one of its finest. Boring because it’s gone past the specificity of the actual “Wait … can she?” moment and into the arena of an incessantly retweeted generic “joke” that doesn’t actually require much cognition. Now there’s a very boring rumor-joke going around that Michele can’t read. ( Moses Sumney, who is everywhere lately, could also be spotted in the audience). I didn’t see actor Lee Pace or Governor Kathy Hochul, but apparently they were also in attendance. The sun never sets on the Ryan Murphy empire, and sure enough, he was there, too. He dated Groff for a while.” My eyes shifted and there was Quinto, next to Michele’s Spring Awakening co-star Gideon Glick, a few seats down from Jonathan Groff himself. She’d go on to squeal in honest shock every time a song began (as if, somehow, this was unexpected at a musical she clearly knew).īehind me, a young man: “No, I haven’t seen American Horror Story. The woman next to me squared her jaw and clasped her hands. The gentleman next to me was very composed and would remain so for all of 30 seconds before the show’s overture began. Nearly blinded by the photo shoot that producer Jordan Roth was having in the lobby, I walked to my seat. He’s a self-proclaimed “Lea stan,” and that’s why he came. I met Chris, a lawyer who said he’d seen the movie a million times but never the stage show. But the overall vibe, somewhat surprisingly, was that everyone was there for Michele in good faith. After it was announced that Michele would replace Feldstein, the rumor mill could not stop itself from churning, and working actors would be smart not to bite the hand that may eventually feed them. Most of the people I spoke to were hesitant to give personal details, and many of them I recognized as working actors in New York theater. We were in line for the bar, and she refused to give a proper quote or go on the record anonymously for this because “I’ve signed too many agreements in my life,” she said.īut there was a shroud of secrecy hovering over many of the attendants. “Literally everyone I know is here,” a young woman standing in front of me told her friends. Thankfully, the rather cruel rumor that many audience members would arrive wearing Sue Sylvester tracksuits (a nod to Michele’s Glee co-star Jane Lynch, who dipped from the production a convenient few weeks before Michele replaced Beanie Feldstein in the lead role) did not prove true. The few straight men I spotted were appropriately holding their girlfriends’ seats as they caught up with their BFA besties in the lobby. Walking into the August Wilson Theatre, the girls chirped happily while the gays raised their eyebrows. There was no way I was going to miss her opening night, partly because I love the musical and partly because who knew what was going to happen? I figured Michele would sing the hell out of every song in the show, but what were the other theatergoers expecting? On September 6, Lea Michele returned to Broadway for her Funny Girl debut, and if that sentence throws you back to 2010, let me take it a century further: If this were 1922, when Fanny Brice (the titular Girl) was reigning in Broadway’s Follies, you could catch me in Times Square wearing a newsboy cap, real “Extra! Extra!” like, holding a daily paper that reads, “Lea Michele Slays Broadway.”
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