Close your eyes and picture Fanny Brice, star of vaudeville, radio and the Ziegfeld Follies. You conjured up an image of Barbra Streisand, didn’t you?
Ever since the contemporary superstar played Brice in Funny Girl, the long-running 1964 Broadway hit and subsequent Oscar-winning movie, the two performers have been intertwined. If anything, Streisand has eclipsed the earlier comic/singer.

Now, director-playwright David H. Bell is determined to put the spotlight back on Brice with his new show, Fanny Brice: the Real Funny Girl, previewing on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, prior to Thursday’s world premiere.
It is not that Bell — who staged Noises Off! at the Maltz last season — is not a fan of Funny Girl, he just thinks it covers a less interesting part of her life.
“I actually love Funny Girl,’ Bell says from his Chicago home base, where most of the show’s rehearsals were held. “But I really wanted to write a show that dealt with Fanny and Billy Rose, the stuff after Funny Girl ends.”
Yes, that post-Nick Arnstein period of Brice’s life, was covered in the movie Funny Lady, but it was so Hollywoodized that the facts barely surfaced. “James Caan is a great actor and he was wonderful, but he didn’t really capture the essence of who Billy Rose was,” says Bell, who calls Rose “kind of a creep.”
Although Brice took Rose as her third husband, she conceded that she never really loved him. “It seemed like something to do between matinees,” says Bell.
Like second husband Arnstein, Brice put her career ahead of her personal life, and never found happiness in the latter. “She was very single-minded and had a career that a single-minded person should have.”
Funny Girl is rarely revived these days and has not been on Broadway since its original production of 45 years ago. In part, says Bell, that is because of the memories of Streisand’s performance and because it is a huge show with several lavish production numbers.
In conceiving The Real Funny Girl, Bell gave himself the creative limitation of using only four actors. “Small cast musicals are in demand,” he notes.
Playing Fanny will be Marya Grady, who was featured in the Maltz’s production of Smokey Joe’s Café. After holding an unsuccessful search for his leading actress in Chicago, Maltz artistic director Andrew Kato showed his guest director a YouTube clip of Grady and he hired her on the spot.
“She ultimately finds that thing in her that is the kind of comedian, the kind of singer and the kind of star that Fanny Brice was, without doing an imitation,” says Bell.
Of Brice or Streisand.
Actor’s Rep resurfaces . . . Bob Carter’s Actor’s Workshop & Repertory Co., the theater training unit and occasional performance group is headed to the Kravis Center. It opens tonight and continues through Nov. 22 with Speech & Debate, a comedy by Stephen Karam about a trio of teenage misfits who have their grievances heard through a debate team they found. The ensemble cast includes Carson Hausmann, Melissa Gonzales, Nathan Ringwood and Kathleen Kenny. They perform on weekends at the Kravis’ Cohen Pavilion. Tickets are $25 ($15 for students), available by calling (561) 832-7469.
A Jewish cornucopia . . . Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson hit it big several years ago with Jewtopia, a comic look at the ethnic dating scene that was such an off-Broadway smash that it spawned a best-selling book, Jewtopia: The Chosen Book for the Chosen People. So what do they do for an encore? A 90-minute sequel show, World of Jewtopia, stitched from the original show, the book and whatever else comes to their minds.
At least they are smart enough to bring it to South Florida. To Delray Beach’s Crest Theatre, in fact. Beginning Wednesday through Sun., Nov. 15. Tickets are $38 — Oy, what a deal! — available at the Crest box office, (561) 243-7922.

FANNY BRICE: THE REAL FUNNY GIRL, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Opens Thursday , runs through Nov. 24.
Tickets: $36-$52
Call: (561) 575-2223