Newly announced star of the upcoming Funny Girl tour Katerina McCrimmon is a relatively new face to Broadway fans, with her star turn as Fanny Brice set to be the actor's first major starring role. But apparently McCrimmon is no stranger to the musical itself. Hear the star-to-be take on the score's "People" in this video from 2016, filmed at the Kennedy Center as part of the Salute to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Scholars, which featured talented young people from around the country in the field of dance, music, and theatre (McCrimmon performs at 29:57). The evening was directed by Broadway legend Debbie Allen.
Hailing from Miami and Cuban-American, McCrimmon was recently seen in the ensemble of The Light in the Piazza at New York City Center Encores! and was an understudy in Broadway's The Rose Tattoo in 2019. McCrimmon was also heavily featured in a recent edition of Playbill's Songwriter Series.
Joining her in the touring cast will be Grammy-winning "Don't Cry Out Loud" singer Melissa Manchester, who starred in the national tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Song and Dance, as Mrs. Brice, along with Stephen Mark Lukas as Nick Arnstein, Izaiah Montaque Harris as Eddie Ryan, Walter Coppage as Florenz Ziegfeld, Leah Platt as Emma and Mrs. Nadler, Christine Bunuan as Mrs. Meeker, Eileen T’Kaye as Mrs. Strakosh, and David Foley Jr. as Tom Keeney. Further casting is to be announced.
Funny Girl, which premiered on Broadway in 1964, features a score by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill and a book by Isobel Lennart, newly adapted by Tony winner Harvey Fierstein for this revival. The original production propelled a young Barbra Streisand to international fame; she would reprise her stage performance in the 1968 film adaptation, winning an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in the process. The biomusical tracks real-life singer and comic Fanny Brice from her humble beginnings in Brooklyn, New York, to fame and fortune onstage in the Ziegfeld Follies and as a radio and screen performer.
The tour is scheduled to begin with a September 9-16 run at Providence Performing Arts Center in Providence, Rhode Island, with more than 30 cities set to follow. See the full itinerary at FunnyGirlOnBroadway.com.
A previous version of this story had a video of McCrimmon singing "The Music That Made Me Dance" in 2020, but that video has been removed from YouTube.
