Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Matthew Murphy
The messy ouster of Beanie Feldstein from Broadway’s Funny Girl revival—and the rather cursed decision to replace her with Glee star Lea Michele—has been the story on everyone’s lips and keyboards for the past week, and will certainly be resuscitated once Michele makes her debut as Fanny Brice in September.
It’s shocking and often satisfying when a celebrity scandal fulfills a long-running public narrative. Michele, a very outspoken Funny Girl fan, had not only performed several songs from the 1964 musical on Glee and even at the 2010 Tony Awards. (I’d argue that her version of “Don’t Rain On My Parade” trumps Barbra Streisand’s original). And the notion that she had been slyly auditioning for the role all this time—and must have been infuriated when Feldstein and her Glee co-star Jane Lynch were cast in the production last year—has been heavily broached on social media by former Gleeks and anyone familiar with Michele’s career.
It’s also a rare occurrence that anyone other than theater nerds would care about the behind-the-scenes logistics of a Broadway show. But Michele and Feldstein’s screen credits and greater celebrity status have given average TV and movie watchers an inlet into an otherwise niche controversy.