| re: Lea Michele gets a note from Barbra Streisand, and it comes in a golden envelope | |
| Posted by: JereNYC (JereNYC@aol.com) 03:13 pm EST 12/08/22 | |
| In reply to: re: Lea Michele gets a note from Barbra Streisand, and it comes in a golden envelope - WaymanWong 01:54 am EST 12/08/22 | |
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| My theory is that Michele was sunk from consideration originally due to a poorly thought out, written, and played storyline on GLEE in which her characater, Rachel Berry, was cast as Fanny in a Broadway revival of FUNNY GIRL. Whenever scenes showed Michele as Rachel as Fanny in the production within the show, the performance came off as a poor imitation of Streisand and nothing more. And the writing on GLEE never made it clear WHY we were seeing what we were seeing. Was it because Rachel Berry was such a limited actress that she could find no other way to play the role other than to mimic Streisand? That would have a been a great story, but the show never went there. Or was it that Lea Michele herself was the limited actress who couldn't do anything more with the role than a Streisand impersonation? We, the audience, don't know and the show never really told us. In fact, this momentus career achievement in the life of Rachel Berry was almost treated like an afterthought on a show in which she was a leading character. Much of the process of her auditioning, being cast, and opening in the show happened off-screen. And, whenever she sang the songs on GLEE, there never any connection with a character other than Rachel's need for a boffo number. She hit all the notes, but...there's more to playing a character than that. One episode had Naya Rivera's Santana singing "Don't Rain on My Parade" and securing a spot as Rachel's stand by. Rivera's performance of the number was easily just as exciting or even more so than Michele's, because it actually worked both as an audition for the role of Fanny and as a defiant character number for Santana herself. Had I been producing a real life FUNNY GIRL revival, I'd have been highly dubious of even bringing Lea Michele into audition based on what I'd seen on GLEE. So it's possible that others might have felt the same. Or felt simply that everyone had seen what Michele could do with the part and that that would impact the box office. |
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