Sara Farb as Fanny Brice and Qasim Khan as Nick Arnstein in Funny Girl.David Cooper/Supplied
“Hello, gorgeous.”
Those are the first words we hear Sara Farb utter when she steps onstage as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, her wig fashioned into decadent curls at the nape of her neck. Heavy beads cling to her dress; a story hangs in the air beneath thick stage haze, just waiting to be told.
Gorgeous, indeed.
But Brice, the real-life vaudeville superstar at the centre of Isobel Lennart’s 1964 musical, was more than the spangles she wore to perform each night; more than the brassy belt she unleashed each time she sang, and for which she became famous beyond New York’s city limits; more than her mysterious, gambling husband.
Much like Brice, the Toronto-raised Farb is more than just one thing. This year, in addition to starring in Funny Girl, she wrote two shows that opened in disparate corners of Ontario. Way Out There, a rock musical co-written with Anton Lipovetsky about a disappearance in the Pacific Northwest, premiered at Sudbury’s YES Theatre in April. Love Us Most, a play about a highly dysfunctional Shakespeare company, then ran at Stratford’s Here for Now Theatre in June. Next February, Farb will play Sally Bowles in Canadian Stage’s highly anticipated run of Cabaret in Toronto.
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But for now, deep in the swing of the Shaw Festival summer season, it’s all Fanny all the time. It’s a famously difficult role – made harder by the shadows of such famous Fannys as Barbra Streisand – and for Farb, it was important to capture shades of the real Brice in her performance without creating a caricature. “I don’t think this show asks for an impersonation,” she said in the lead-up to opening night.
Sara Farb as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl.David Cooper/Supplied
Playing Fanny was a long time coming, she added. Though this year marks Farb’s first season at the Shaw Festival – “I love it here,” she said, underscoring the company’s focus on ensemble work – Farb, 39, has spent much of her adult life learning the show, finding passages in Jule Styne’s score to practise and refine on the off chance a company might cast her. Every few seasons, she‘s sung through the piece from start to finish, revisiting it whenever a rumour has circulated that one of Ontario’s major theatre festivals might produce the show.
“That would happen every three to five years, and I always said I’d believe it when I saw it,” she said of the rumours, laughing. “But it lived in my head. I figured it would never happen. But then there was a more formal conversation with Shaw, and I took that seriously.”
That’s not to say Fanny is much easier for Farb to sing now than a decade ago. Farb is among Canada’s most consistently employed performers – her CV includes a stint on Broadway in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, plus the string of plays and musicals in Toronto that have made her such a familiar face onstage. But she had to train specifically for the quirks of Styne’s score, which sits in an awkward spot for most women’s voices. Songs such as Don’t Rain on My Parade are deceptively difficult: If a singer belts the whole thing, it can sound pinched and shouty. But if she holds back, the Act One finale can sound underpowered and puny.
There’s a delicate balance that has to be struck, the actor said – one she found with vocal coach Julia McLellan.
“We got to work last year on really identifying the sounds I wanted to make, the sounds I believed had to be made in this score,” said Farb, who specialized in drama at Earl Haig Secondary School before pursuing an English degree at the University of Toronto. “And with an emphasis on sustainability. There isn’t a song I sing in this show that doesn’t end on a difficult note. It’s treacherous, really. And there is so. Much. Music.”
Styne’s score offers precious few boons – “ah” vowels are the easiest ones to belt, according to Farb, and many of Fanny’s songs end on less forgiving “ee”s and “eh”s – but the singer has found ways to make the material work for her. When she sings in Funny Girl, her voice sounds healthy, without a crackle or weak spot to be heard: There’s little doubt she could give the same performance multiple times a week without straining.
Meanwhile, Brice’s story, about her rise to fame and tumultuous marriage to high roller Nicky Arnstein (played at Shaw by Qasim Khan), poses hurdles of its own for any performer in the role. In the wrong hands, Fanny can come off as shrill, opportunistic, vain. (“Hello, gorgeous” aside, much of Funny Girl’s plot focuses on Brice’s unconventional beauty.) But Fanny also possesses a vulnerability that an actor must tap into in order to make Funny Girl work.
Farb as Cordelia and Colm Feore as King Lear in the play King Lear.David Hou/Supplied
Farb can do vulnerable. Over the years, she’s played a number of highly layered women – Fun Home’s Medium Alison, Harry Potter’s Delphi Diggory, King Lear’s Cordelia. Even The Last Timbit, an advertorial musical for Tim Hortons’ 60th anniversary, saw Farb tap into her inner strength as a friendless loner named Chloe. (“I really, really loved that show,” she said of the donut-themed production.)
Farb’s own writing – sometimes plays, more often musicals – tends to feature women with similarly thorny conflicts.
Case in point: Love Us Most.
Set during a 2016 production of King Lear at an unnamed repertory company, the play is a damning condemnation of what can happen behind closed doors at powerful theatres. (While Farb played Cordelia in a 2014 production of King Lear at the Stratford Festival, she has said the workplace represented in her play, though familiar, is fictional.) A sizzling – and gutsy – examination of how race, gender and power can intersect both on- and off-stage, Love Us Most is the sort of thing Farb does best: It’s honest, funny and, in the end, utterly devastating.
Farb's play, Love Us Most, is about a highly dysfunctional Shakespeare company.Ann Baggley/Supplied
“She has this natural tendency to investigate in all she does,” said Kimberley Rampersad, associate artistic director of the Shaw Festival and director of Canadian Stage’s upcoming Cabaret. “When she sees something challenging, she doesn’t shy away from it, or excuse it or elide it. She’s curious, and she tries to crack it open. That’s a part of her rigour, which she naturally brings into her work not only as a writer but as an actor.”
Behind the scenes, Farb is “singular in vibe,” added Rampersad, a quality that locked in her casting as Sally Bowles.
Funny Girl director Eda Holmes concurred: “I wouldn’t have accepted directing this show with anyone else attached to the role,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone else in Canada who could bring a new idea to Fanny. She is so inventive, so authentic. I couldn’t have signed on for this if it hadn’t been her.”
Until Oct. 3, Farb is savouring her summer at Shaw: In addition to Funny Girl, she appears in The Wind in the Willows. For Farb, it’s been hard to miss the milestones of her other projects – “I feel like an absent parent,” she said in April, as Way Out There and Love Us Most inched toward completion, largely without their author in the rehearsal hall – but in many ways, this season feels like a culmination of all she’s worked for since childhood.
“Musical theatre has been my ride or die since I was a kid,” she said, recalling late nights of listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber cassette tapes and dreaming about some day playing Annie, or maybe Norma Desmond. “But this is on another level. This is the life.”