IS there anything Sheridan Smith can’t do?

Gritty drama (Tower Block, The Moorside) – tick. Comedy (Two Pints of Lager, Royle Family) – tick. Song-based shows (Legally Blonde, Cilla) – tick.

Now she has reprised her 2015/16 West End role as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl for its UK tour which breezed into the Bristol Hippodrome this week.

This is the show that first propelled Barbra Streisand to mega-stardom and has rarely been tackled in the 50 years since.

Needless to say Ms Smith’s take on the ordinary girl made good is a triumph and it’s no surprise that tickets have moved faster than pastrami and rye orders at a Jewish deli.

The 20 minutes leading up to the interval are pure musical theatre gold – two stonewall standards in People and Don’t Rain On My Parade on either side of You Are Woman, I Am Man, which was made even more endearing by Smith corpsing alongside the silk-voiced Chris Peluso (Nick Arnstein) during the seduction scene.

Here a UK tour delivered the full West End experience – large talented cast, lavish costumes, innovative staging, great performances and a live 11-piece orchestra, overtures and all.

So credit to the Menier Chocolate Factory for originally resurrecting the show in 2015 after five decades.

This is an unashamedly old fashioned entertainment, as befits a show based on the Ziegfeld Follies in the 1920s when Brice became its biggest draw. Old fashioned, too, in the consummate craft of the writing.

First performed on Broadway in 1963 it comes from the era when often-Jewish talent in New York’s Brill Building were churning out pop hits and the likes of composer Jule Styne were penning Funny Girl and Gypsy.

Funny Girl requires a big performance from its star and Smith – who is fast becoming a national treasure – delivers.

She’s dowdy and awkward in the opening scenes, especially in comparison to the tall, willowy blondes of the chorus line. But then Brice’s career with the Follies was not built on conventional beauty but on her comedic talent.

In one number she looks like a female Don Estelle in a green fat suit!

The ‘book’ of the show is peppered with one-liners and comic asides, and Smith, along with the venerable card-playing trio of her mother (Rachel Izen), Mrs Sarkosh (Myra Sands) and Mrs Meeker (Zoe Ann Bown), wring the last titter out of them.

Fanny is understandably swept off her feet by the suave and debonair Arnstein – although her wannabe boyfriend Eddie Ryan (Joshua Lay), with some prescience, prefers to describe him as ‘slick’.

A catch for any showgirl in his elegant black tux during Act One, but in Act Two we know Arnstein’s on the slippery slope when he appears in a beige suit!

In the much shorter and weaker second act, as Brice’s bank balance and wardrobe swells, her personal life disintegrates with the shyster Arnstein heading for financial ruin and prison.

But the show which chronicles the first half of real life Fanny’s professional career manages to end on a joyous high again as she looks forward with the reprise of ‘Parade’ – which I guarantee you will be humming all the way home.