Funny Girl

Starred review from January 12, 2015
Barbara Parker of 1960s Blackpool is a big fish in a small pondâbeautiful, astute, and with aspirations of making it in television like her idol Lucille Ball. Upon moving to London, Barbara changes her name to Sophie and gets her big break. She walks in to an audition she's not suited for and leaves with the writers excited to pen a show specifically for her. The majority of Hornby's clever novel follows Sophie and her creative circle of friends through the success of the subsequent program on BBC. There's Clive, Barbara's foppish costar, Tony and Bill, the bantering and bickering writing partners who pen each episode, and Dennis, the producer who alternately fights for their program's creative direction and struggles to hide his growing fondness for Sophie, a woman he believes is completely out of his league. Hornby wonderfully captures the voice and rhythms of broadcast television of the time, and seems to delight in endless inversions of art imitating life imitating art, his characters inspiring and feeding upon the storylines they produce. The result is a delightful collection of characters that care as much as they harm, each struggling to determine who they want to be.

Emma Fielding's performance of this gloriously entertaining novel makes for pure delight. The heroine, Barbara from Blackpool, starts life with a strong Lancashire accent. Starstruck, na•ve, and beautiful, with a va-va-voom figure, she moves to London in the swinging '60's, convinced she can become the next Lucille Ball. What could possibly go wrong? We know very well: everything. But Hornby's brief here is that sometimes nice and talented people deserve what they want, and get it. What a concept! Fielding's performance is so polished and lively and sympathetic that you barely notice what dazzling technique is on display. Indeed, when she voices the male characters, you lose track of the fact that it's a woman doing it. This production is well-nigh irresistible. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine