Spending a night with 'Fanny' good for a lot of laughs

Life of comedienne Fanny Brice captured at Rosslyn Spectrum Fanny Brice -- for 30 years a great vaudeville and radio comedienne, creator of the character and longtime Ziegfield Follies star -- was the original Funny Girl.Now she comes alive again, on stage at the Rosslyn Spectrum in Arlington through Nov. 27 in a one-woman, cabaret-disabled show presented by The American Century Theater and headlined by a gifted singer and comedienne herself, local talent Esther Covington.Covington makes the comedy look easy, delivering jokes that seem natural and believable. Recently seen as Bella in Neil Simon's at Theatre J in Washington, D.C., Covington lives, breathes and sings her heart out here as Brice, who died in 1951. She was portrayed by Barbra Steisand in the 1964 Broadway hit based on Brice's life, and in the 1968 biopic adaptation, for which Steisand won an Academy Award.But in Brice's relationship with her second husband, gambler and con-man Julius Arnstein, took center stage and was highly fictionalized. says TACT artistic director Jack Marshall.Instead, Brice says Marshall.The daughter of Lower East Side saloon owners, she changed her name from Fania Borach to avoid being typecast in Yiddish parts after she dropped out of school in 1908 to work as a chorus girl in a burlesque revue. But Brice made her Broadway musical comedy debut during its 1909-10 season with a song Irving Berlin wrote for her, complete with a fake Yiddish accent and a comic parody of Salome's seductive dance of the seven veils. She brought down the house.Soon she began her association with Broadway impresario Florenz ("Flo") Ziegfield, starring in his Follies as a triple threat singer, dancer and comic. But her real life was far from funny: Her second marriage, after first living with him for six years, was to Arnstein, a dashing mobster and confidence man who exploited her financially and repeatedly cheated on her, was twice imprisoned and eventually deserted her and their two children."She was far from all laughs," says Marshall.In the 1940s, Brice launched a new career, parlaying her character of a precocious but mischievous toddler first presented as a cute-baby routine in 1937, to new stardom onOur ignorance of the real Fanny Brice led New York City-based playwright Chip DeFaa, an authority on American entertainment between the two World Wars, to craft this one-woman musical revue to showcase the real woman in life and in song, Marshall says. And with more than 20 songs in all -- such as and -- the show is packed with music, along with Brice's character speaking directly to the audience about her life's highs and lows.Longtime newsman DeFaa, for years a New York Post journalist who also wrote and directed, premiered this show as its director in New Jersey earlier this year. The TACT production is its second, and according to Marshall, it's possible that the play can move next to the new Artisphere in Rosslyn."One Night with Fanny Brice" by Chip DeFaaThrough Nov. 278 p.m. Thursday-Saturday (no performance Thanksgiving)Matinees at 2:30 p.m. Saturday and SundayRosslyn Spectrum, 1611 N. Kent St., ArlingtonTickets at 703-998-4555 or www.americancentury.org

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