Sheridan Smith: ‘I’d love to take Funny Girl to Broadway… if they’ll have me’

Smith said of her role: “Who wouldn’t want to play Fanny Brice? She was amazing, she was a girl who didn’t fit the mould, which I can relate to”
Ovation: Sheridan Smith at the first night of Funny Girl
Dave Benett
Robert Dex @RobDexES3 December 2015

Funny Girl star Sheridan Smith says it is her “dream” to take the show to Broadway after she received a standing ovation for her performance in the role made famous by Barbra Streisand.

The actress, whose television roles include Charmian Biggs, wife of train robber Ronnie, in Mrs Biggs and Cilla Black in Cilla, said she did not hesitate to take on the musical which recounts real-life comedian Fanny Brice’s rise to stardom and the collapse of her marriage to gambler Nick Arnstein.

“I would have kicked myself for the rest if my life if I’d said no,” said Smith, 34. “Who wouldn’t want to play Fanny Brice? She was amazing, she was a girl who didn’t fit the mould, which I can relate to.”

The show sold out its run at the Menier Chocolate Factory within hours and is moving to the Savoy Theatre for a 12-week run in April, although Smith revealed that this could be extended “if the demand is there”.

The original musical was a Broadway hit in 1964 and Streisand took it to the West End two years later. In 1968, she appeared in the film adaptation with Omar Sharif. The film was a huge hit and made a star of Streisand.

Smith admitted that she would love to take the show back to Broadway: “That’s kind of my dream, but I don’t know — would they take a Lincolnshire girl doing a New York, Brooklyn girl?

“Barbra Streisand made it her own and there is only one Barbra Streisand. No one can outdo Babs, so the key to it is putting your own stamp on it and remembering the story was about Fanny Brice. It’s her biography, not Barbra Streisand’s, which people seem to get confused about.

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“But I think there is a new generation of people who don’t know the story and I think it resonates with them. I can certainly relate to it, trying to balance your work life with a relationship, while loving being on stage.

“There is a beautiful line in it where I say, ‘I love the audience but you can’t taken an audience home with you’ and it’s so true.”

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