The Broadway musical that launches the new Chichester season also made the name of Barbra Streisand back in 1964, provoking an ecstatic Time magazine to call her a “new girl for all seasons”, a “boneless wonder” and, bizarrely, a “seal doing a balancing act”. Well, Samantha Spiro, who stars in the show's first major British revival for 40 years, isn't new, boneless or noticeably seal-like. My view is that this small, round, vital actress is still deciding if she's a vole, a duckling or Tweetie Pie the cartoon canary. But whatever the zoological truth, her Fanny Brice is as good as the musical's creators allow her to be.

Brice was a New York vaudeville comic who brought mischief as well as a fine singing voice to the Ziegfeld Follies a century ago. The problem is that her story is less interesting than it could be, thanks largely to the need of the librettist, Isobel Lennart, to keep onside a daughter hugely protective of Brice's posthumous reputation. So her marriage to a raffish gambler, Mark Umbers's Nick Arnstein, is idealised as a near-flawless love match. His adulteries go unmentioned, his imprisonment for embezzlement doesn't mean he isn't a very decent, caring fellow, and their subsequent, amicable parting seems barely explicable.

Nor does the sentimentality end there. How could it when it involves Broadway's favourite subject, namely Broadway itself? David Killick's Ziegfeld may bluster, but the threats that the showbiz tyrant makes when Brice gets uppity are empty and his heart is soft as silk.

Again, it's none too clear how the pintpot comedienne can be a pushy embarrassment one moment and a major star the next. The tale needs exploration and not the narrative padding provided by the homely neighbourhood women who irrelevantly and pointlessly urge Sheila Steafel, as Fanny's dear old mum, to “get yourself a man”.

The sexual politics are pretty dated, suggesting as they do that Arnstein's proud male ego must be preserved at all costs, yet there are compensations. Jule Styne's score may not be his best, though a song called People has class and Don't Rain on My Parade something more, but Bob Merrill's lyrics are top-notch. How many British wordsters would rhyme nonchalence with restaurants, or let a cynical crone tell the young Brice that “when a girl's credentials are no bigger than two lentils, it doesn't spell success”?

And then there's Samantha Spiro, babbling and bubbling and wickedly spoofing chorus girls so tall and elegant that Whistler might have painted them. There's one number in which she appears, jauntily pregnant, among dancing brides in wedding dresses and another where she trots on, a female Chaplin in a too-big military uniform, to join prancing soldiers. I'd have liked less workaday bio, and more such fun.

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