Mazel Tovah! ‘Funny Girl’ revival brings Feldshuh back to Broadway

Feldshuh was born in New York City, raised in Scarsdale and graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1966. “After January 1st it will be my 50th year of doing such things,” Feldshuh said. “So I’m very, very thrilled to be in my hometown.”

Feldshuh had last been on Broadway in Pippin 2015 and after one of her “favorite producers,” Daryl Roth, came to speak to her about taking the role of Fanny’s mom, Feldshuh went to see the show.

“When I saw it with Julie [Benko] it redefined the whole show for me and I said, ‘Huh, maybe I can make this work,’” Feldshuh said. “And then I had certain advantages, one very obvious one is that my ethnic background is Jewish. I’m the first American actress of the Jewish religion to play this role in 60 years. It was cast with Irish-Catholic people before that.”

For Feldshuh the role was open to her own flavor because unlike Fanny Brice, “the greatness of the role is not on the page” — it’s something “you have to create.”

“It’s not in the writing for Rosie Brice as much as it is for Fanny,” Feldshuh said. “Fanny Brice is the greatest role written for a woman on the American musical stage. Period.” And Michele has been “marinating” for that role since she was on “Glee,” she said.

As cliché as it sounds, critics and audiences agree that the show is now a smash hit.

“It’s wonderful to be back on Broadway,” Feldshuh said. “It’s a very electric experience. It’s more like a theatrical event, not just a theatrical performance, and people were hankering for us for whatever reasons to get into this show and they make their feelings about that extremely clear when we enter the stage.”

Feldshuh called Michele “a doll,” and called the pairing as mother and daughter “perfect.” Feldshuh could tell the first day she showed up for rehearsal on Aug. 15, three weeks before their first show together, that it was going to work as she’d hoped. She also finds herself a match as Julie Benko’s mother once a week as all three of the women are around 5 feet in stature and have a similar-enough look.

Benko began appearing in some shows as Fanny Brice in July to strong reviews, Michele had already been working on the role since June and Feldshuh was going through her own process in order to “ground the role in truth.”

Feldshuh is doing “everything” differently from the way Jane Lynch played the character before her. For starters, Lynch is a foot taller, so they move differently, and they also sing, dance and speak differently. Feldshuh is putting her own spin on the character.

“Even coming down the spiral staircase I think I skip the first step,” Feldshuh said. “I just use my arms to pole vault over the first couple of steps. I come down very, very fast because I can.”

Feldshuh is energetic in the role and treats her friends Mrs. Meeker, played by Debra Cardona, and Mrs. Strakosh, played by Toni DiBuono, differently.

“These are my cronies, but Strakosh oversteps endlessly and can be very annoying and is always trying to one-up me,” she said. “That’s a very important distinction in the way I love those two women differently. I love the two actresses, of course, but I’m not going to get on the stage and treat Strakosh the way I treat Meeker, just like I’m not going to treat you, Todd, the way I treat [my publicist] Kendall Edwards. I don’t even treat Brandon the way I treat Amanda, my children.”

Feldshuh doesn’t have a favorite role, saying they’re all “different children.”

“This is a good supporting role in a phenomenal musical and I try to make it a great supporting role in a phenomenal musical phenomenally performed by phenomenal players led by Lea Michelle, Ramin Karimloo [Nick Arnstein] and Jared Grimes [Eddie Ryan],” Feldshuh said. “I have to excavate this part every day that I play her to find out what’s deeper, what’s better. Did we carve this line? What does this mean? What do we do with that? So I’m working on it.”

Being at the August Wilson Theatre for “Funny Girl” is as invigorating as her Broadway debut in 1973.

“I think it’s more of a thrill because you’re older and you’re so grateful,” she said. “There’s so much gratitude around your life as an older person that you can still do eight [shows] a week and still kick your feet up. I kick my legs as high as my shoulders. No kidding. So I’m very grateful.”

Michele performs seven times per week with Benko, whom Feldshuh called “absolutely remarkable,” playing Fanny on Thursday nights. The rest of the cast performs eight shows weekly.

Beanie Feldstein and Lynch, who originated the roles in the revival based on the book by Harvey Fierstein, both left well in advance of their initially announced Sept. 25 departure date with Michele and Feldshuh already announced to replace them. The impact of the casting changes cannot be understated as the rave reviews — and increased box office success — speak volumes.

“We owe Beanie and Jane everything because Beanie and Jane started this saga,” Feldshuh said. “Lea and I are probably credited with much more than we deserve, but I’m glad that once we showed up — or should I say [Lea] showed up? — the box office shot up a million dollars a week.”

Becoming Tovah

Feldshuh has distinct memories of growing up participating in theater in Scarsdale, though she never expected it to become her career. In Mrs. Clay’s sixth grade class she had a part in “Panic in the Palace.” The next year she was crying when she didn’t think she had a real part in a performance about Paul Revere. Her teacher took her aside and explained the poem she’d be reading on stage by herself to start the show was in fact a “huge part.” In eighth grade she played “Rhapsody in Blue” on piano at graduation.

In high school she appeared in “An Enemy of the People,” changing Mr. Kiil to Mrs. Kiil. She was Gladys Antrobus in “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

Feldshuh, then still called Terri Sue, was accepted to Vassar and Smith, but SHS Dean Fitzgerald told her that since she was so creative she should attend Sarah Lawrence. “I just didn’t question it,” she said. Had she gone to Vassar she might have connected with Meryl Streep and perhaps gone on to Yale Drama with her, but she would not have been set on a path that led to her breakthrough as Yentl on Broadway.

There were two key factors in her success — aside from her talent, perseverance and bold decisions early in her career — one being her name change to Tovah, her Hebrew name.

“Changing my name changed the landscape of my entire life,” she said. “I have to say for the better, because this is the life I’ve lived and I don’t want to discard the values by which I have stood. It’s been a great ride.”

The other was her older brother David’s recommendation to apply for the McKnight Fellowship in Acting after she was waitlisted by Harvard Law School. David, then the associate artistic director at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater, had won the award earlier, and at ages 26 and 21 they were the first brother-sister team at the Guthrie in Minneapolis.

“We were groomed by my mother and father not to go into the theater, so my brother and I both went into the theater,” Feldshuh said. David, an alum of SHS Class of 1961, headed Cornell University’s theater department for 25 years, was a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist (“Miss Evers’ Boys”) and became an emergency room doctor.

Feldshuh was an understudy at the Guthrie for two seasons before finally breaking through in “Cyrano,” which went to Broadway in 1973, because she could “sing and dance and do a cartwheel,” working with Michael Langham and Michael Kidd along the way. Christopher Plummer won the 1974 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical.

Feldshuh hired an agent and was offered $500 a week by Universal Studios, but since they wouldn’t pay for her singing and dancing lessons as they had for Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, she turned it down to follow her dream of being a “great actress” and a “leading lady.” She knew she was “such a gutsy kid” to make that move, but she held out for better roles. She turned down several solid opportunities and it paid off.

Feldshuh does not take any role, any experience or any choice she’s made for granted.

“By the time you get cast in Broadway they’ve eliminated a hundred people and they’ve chosen you,” she said. “How bad could the experience be? Every night before I go on I always say, ‘This is someone’s first Broadway musical and this is someone’s last Broadway musical — hit it out of the park.’”

She said she never misses a performance, with the exception of three Jewish holidays each year, as per her contract, or a rare pre-planned speaking engagement.

After “Cyrano,” Feldshuh appeared in “Brainchild,” “Dreyfus in Rehearsal” and “Rodgers & Hart” before landing the titular role in “Yentl” in 1975, for which she received a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 1976, her first of four Tony nominations. In 1975-76 she played Yentl 223 times at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and won a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Individual in 1976.

Feldshuh was Flor in “Saravá” in 1979 (1979 Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical) before returning to Broadway a decade later as Maria in “Lend Me a Tenor” (1989 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play/1989 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play) for 476 shows at the Royale Theatre. From 2003-05, she played Golda Meir in “Golda’s Balcony” (2004 Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play/2003 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance) at the Helen Hayes Theatre for 493 performances, the longest-running one-woman play in Broadway history.

In 2009, Feldshuh played Irena Gut Opdyke in “Irena’s Vow,” and from 2013-15 she was Berthe in “Pippin” for her longest run: 672 shows at the Music Box Theatre.

She has also appeared off-Broadway two dozen times, toured the country in multiple shows and been in dozens of movies like “Kissing Jessica Stein” and television shows like “Law & Order” (recurring as attorney Danielle Melnick) and “The Walking Dead.”

For Feldshuh, it all started back in Scarsdale, where she remembers riding her bicycle until the sun went down and having a blast on Halloween, never worrying about crime or guns as we do today. She also recalls the many nonpartisan committees working together to better the village.

“Scarsdale was a good and decent and wondrous place to grow up in as a child,” she said. “So I say to those who are there and in the wonderful school system, if you have a dream don’t give up on it. Stay on the field of play. Like the goat climbing the mountain, one hoof at a time. But you will summit that mountain.”

You got this, Gorgeous.