You have to admire the risk-taking of the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, beginning its subscription season with a world premiere musical, Fanny Brice: The Real Funny Girl. Nevertheless, audiences will likely spend most of the evening wishing they were seeing the real Funny Girl.

The Maltz commissioned director-choreographer David H. Bell (who staged last season’s Noises Off) to write a small-cast show about the legendary star of vaudeville, film and the Ziegfeld Follies. And from the title he chose, you might think Bell decided to debunk the liberties taken by the 1964 musical biography of Brice that was Barbra Streisand’s first and only starring role on Broadway.

In fact, the new show’s first act closely follows the outline of Funny Girl, without any substantial differences of fact. The second act then focuses on Brice’s third marriage, to blowhard impresario Billy Rose, leaving the distinct impression that she made the same mistakes in romance that she did with husband two, gambler and crook Nick Arnstein.

The score is culled from existing songs of Brice’s time, either tunes she sang and made famous or those she might have sung. In this, Bell makes some astute selections and one major miscalculation. The show is at its best when it features comic specialty material, like Irving Berlin’s Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars or the dance spoof, Becky is Back in the Ballet. But at the finale, when he needs an emotional gut-wrencher, Bell settles for My Man, which only manages to remind us that the Funny Girl film made exactly the same choice 41 years earlier.

Bell does do one thing very right and that is casting Marya Grandy as Brice. She encompasses the woman’s talent extremes, from truly inspired clowning in that ballet number to a full-out chilling rendition of the torch song, Aggravatin’ Man. Like Brice, Grandy’s nose is a little too big and her face has more character than classic beauty. But remember her name, because she has what it takes for stardom, even if this vehicle is insufficient to get her there.

As good as Grandy is, she needs more sturdy material to succeed. For instance, she is called on to deliver a comedy sketch as Brice’s “widdle goil” character Babykins — a precursor to Baby Snooks — that is painfully unfunny.

Three men handle the rest of the roles, from Stef Tovar’s exasperating Rose to Lance Baker’s Arnstein to Frank Kopyc’s Flo Ziegfeld. Each works plenty hard, but when called on to double and triple in assignments, the conceit seems more economic than artistic.

Expecting the Maltz to match the level of Funny Girl’s lavish production numbers is unreasonable, but two guys and a few headless mannequins is a poor substitute for a Follies show. Factor in Brian Sidney Bembridge’s sketchy backstage set and you get the sense that this is a workshop for the full production to be mounted at a later date.