A family album that’s a big hit
Music by Jeanine Tesori. Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. Directed by Robert McQueen. Until May 6 at the CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge Street. Mirvish.com or 416-872-1212. How do you solve a problem like Bruce — a middle-aged, romantic, high-strung intellectual and war veteran with a temper? Who lives with his family in a funeral home in small-town Pennsylvania, a business he supplements by teaching high school English to provide for three kids, a wife, and a passion for home restoration? Who, all the while, hides a history of homosexual affairs from his family, and who likely committed suicide at 44 by jumping in front of a truck?
And how do you solve it from the perspective of his daughter, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who came out to her parents only four months before his death?
This is the question posed by one of the more important musicals of the new millennium, five-time 2015 Tony Awardwinning Fun Home, running in a production by the Musical Stage Company presented in the Off-Mirvish series — its name taken from the bestselling graphic novel memoir that Bechdel wrote in 2006.
In both the novel and the musical, adapted by composer Jeanine Tesori and playwright Lisa Kron, the fates of father and daughter are revealed in similarly blunt and unceremonious ways early on leaving room not for plot twists and cliffhangers, but for complex character studies.
Bechdel and Kron stuff the story with literary allusions not only because of Bruce Bechdel’s obsession with classics, but also, as Bechdel herself writes, because her family is often better understood through the fiction of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, James and Colette than reality. The musical Fun Home opens with Alison (Laura Condlln) against a stark white wall (or a blank piece of paper), looking through her father’s things, at around the same age he was when he died. Camellia Koo’s set rises to reveal Alison’s ornate childhood home behind it, and the rest of the musical is framed as Alison’s memories, which she watches from the sidelines, sometimes sketching it to make sense of her past.
Condlln, a seasoned actor in her first musical (and sometimes it shows), is an endlessly watchable listener as she observes Small Alison (the adorable Hannah Levinson, a past Matilda) grow up in a household that alternates between warmth and ice (which has nothing to do with the dead bodies in the basement), and Medium Alison (Sara Farb, formerly of the Stratford Festival, in a slam-dunk casting choice) discovering her homosexuality at Oberlin College.
The three Alisons triple each other beautifully — each one carries an increasingly heavy step, a more furrowed brow.
Farb’s journey through Alison’s innocence and insecurities, past the confusion of her coming out, the joy of her new identity leavened by the anger around her parents’ secrets, is clear and strong. Her performance of “Changing My Major,” just after Alison’s first sexual experience with a woman, is a study in the tension between self-restraint and complete abandon, of the intellectual and the libidinal. These moments, punctuated by Condlln’s groans of embarrassment looking back from a wiser point of view, provide some of the musical’s funniest moments.
And that’s necessary, because Fun Home obviously goes to extremely dark places, mostly courtesy of Alison’s father Bruce, played by Evan Buliung — a hulking presence in khakis and button-down shirts. Robert McQueen, a director with a strong sentimental streak, helps Buliung nail it when it comes to creating a Bruce who’s vulnerable, tortured and sympathetic. When he’s mean — and he’s really, really mean, specifically to his wife Helen (Cynthia Dale, who’s strong in an underwritten part) — it feels more like a rare moment of weakness than a prolonged attitude toward his family. He’s strict, not a tyrant. And when he sings Alison to sleep on a family vacation, it feels as if it’s nothing out of the blue — when in fact, it’s one of the only clear positive memories the real Bechdel clings to.
The best thing McQueen does, really, is get out of the way of Tesori’s unforgettable score. She translates Bechdel’s inner life into music — including a bouncy theme when the Bechdels pose as the perfect family, the kids singing a robotic refrain of “ba ba ba” in the background (as Bruce often sees them). She’s also able to spin a single cell in Bechdel’s graphic novel into a song, “Maps,” that balloons into a story of lost potential and feeling rooted to home.
Even if Levinson wasn’t so cute, a musical shift in the show’s theme song “Ring of Keys” would make sure tears come to your eyes.
It’s a respectful production of an important musical, one that favours humanism over melodrama, and complexity over simplicity. There’s no place like this Fun Home.