SEPTEMBER 23, 2015
When one thinks of award-winning musicals, what usually comes to mind are audience pleasers such as “My Fair Lady” or “Hello, Dolly!” The important thing to know about “Fun Home,” the winner of this year’s hotly-contested Tony Award race for Best Musical, is that it is definitely not “Hello, Dolly!”
Based on the acclaimed 2006 graphic memoir by out cartoonist Alison Bechdel and honed in theater workshops for several years, “Fun Home” is narrated by an adult Alison (Tony nominee Beth Malone, very strong), recalling her challenging childhood growing up in her family’s funeral parlor (or “fun home,” as her siblings called it).
But that’s not the half of it.
As she tells her story, her character is played by three different actresses. In addition to adult Alison, there’s Middle Alison (Tony nominee Emily Skeggs, very good), a 19 year-old student at Oberlin who is just beginning to act on her gay sexuality and Small Alison (Tony nominee Sydney Lucas, though at our performance the role was ably played by Gabriella Pizzolo, who will take over the role permanently from Lucas on October 4). Small Alison, aged 8, loves to play “airplane” with her father Bruce (an excellent Michael Cerveris, who won a Best Actor Tony for this role), an obsessive demanding dad who is also a teacher and a home restorer, in addition to running the funeral home. What Small Alison doesn’t know is that her father’s relationship with her mother Helen (Tony nominee Judy Kuhn, terrific as always) is slowly coming apart.
As Middle Alison is working out her sexual identity in college, she is shocked to learn that her father Bruce is also gay, though closeted, with a particular taste for underage boys. When her coming-out letter is ignored by her parents, she brings her new girlfriend Joan (Roberta Colindrez) home for vacation, only to see the damage that her father’s closeted behavior has done to their family.
This is heavy material for a Broadway musical, to say the least, but in the hands of Sam Gold (Tony Award-winner for his direction here), it is surefooted and even uplifting. “Fun Home” is being staged at the Circle in the Square theater, Broadway’s only house that is in the round, a theater that has tripped up many a director used to proscenium staging. Not Gold. “Fun Home” works as well as it does in part because no seat is any farther than 9 rows away from the action, creating an intimacy with the audience that this sensitive material demands.
With music by Jeanine Tesori and book & lyrics by Lisa Kron (the first all-female team to win Tonys in these categories), the story is strong and the music is there solely to further that story and serve the characters. The one standout song, however, is “Ring of Keys,” sung by Small Alison, a song which pointedly recalls the moment when this very young girl first lays eyes on a butch delivery woman in a luncheonette and finds an unexplained something stirring inside her. In my years of theatergoing, I have never encountered a more effective depiction of sexual awakening than this, and it’s expressed in a song! Great, great work.
You don’t leave “Fun Home” tapping your feet or humming the tunes, but that’s OK. You leave “Fun Home” thinking about the human condition, perhaps about your own family and about how fallible we all are.
