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The musical theater actor plays ne’er-do-well gambler Nicky Arnstein in the national touring company of “Funny Girl” that opens at the Fox Theatre on July 30. When he had just enrolled in New York University back in 2006, his first voice teacher said, “You’re gonna play Nicky Arnstein someday.”
“I was like, well, that’s a strange thing to say,” he recalls, “because I sort of knew that the show was not really done anymore. It was sort of seen as a clunky old show and they weren’t gonna revive it because it was too hard to do without Barbra Streisand.”
Then in 2022, a new “Funny Girl” revival launched on Broadway, with Streisand doppelgänger Lea Michele (“Glee”), a revised book by Harvey Fierstein that emphasized the show’s New York Jewish roots, new choreography and rearranged Jule Styne musical numbers, while still keeping the showstoppers: “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “People,” “My Man” and “I’m the Greatest Star.”
“One of the goals of this revival was to really flesh out the character, make him more human and give him a little bit more motivation for his actions,” Lukas says. “So he’s not just a villain.”
After understudying Arnstein on Broadway, Lukas began playing him in the national tour that started in September 2023 and runs through spring 2025.
In the musical, Arnstein is a lovable rogue who goes to jail for embezzlement and ends up splitting from Fanny. The real Nick Arnstein was a lot more than that.
