‘Fun Home’ a modern take on family
“Fun Home” pushes boundaries with a contemporary story that earns a place in the evolution of musical theater. Looking back, Rodgers & Hammerstein never took the easy road — their beautiful tunes often expressed racial and cultural conflicts. And Stephen Sondheim has found musical fodder in presidential assassins and a barbarous barber.
Composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist/librettist Lisa Kron likewise mined gold from Alison Bechdel’s best-selling 2006 graphic novel, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” an autobiographical story about the lesbian cartoonist’s life with her closeted father.
Tony Award voters gave their top honor to “Fun Home,” the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist. From 12 nominations in 2015, it won five awards, including for book, score and Michael Cerveris as best actor in a musical.
The show ran on Broadway for more than a year, and the tour that launched in October stops at Heinz Hall, Downtown, Tuesday through next Sunday.
Three actresses play Alison at different stages — small and medium Alison, and the short-haired bespectacled cartoonist as an adult, played by Kate Shindle, the current president of Actors’ Equity
and a former Miss America. Robert Petkoff plays Bruce, the father who demands that family members take part in his obsessive redecorating of their old house in small-town Pennsylvania.
The Tesori-Kron dynamic duo, a gender rarity in musical theater, looked at the story of a daughter coming of age with a difficult father, a teacher who ran a funeral home — the “fun home” of the title — and somehow saw a musical. The compact, intermission-free 100 minutes reflect a dark side of family life, but the “fun” also applies to humor.
“That’s what I think is so appealing about the story,” Mr. Petkoff said. “People go to musicals, and they think, ‘I’m going to see this particular type of show.’ And ‘Fun Home’ breaks those barriers down. It takes you on a tragic journey, but it’s also filled with hope and light and joy. People don’t expect that kind of complexity from a musical.”
Bruce Bechdel certainly is a model of complexity and therefore an actor’s dream. The New Yorkbased Petkoff, who boasts six Broadway shows on his resume, had auditioned for the part before “Fun Home” moved to the Great White Way. When he was offered the tour, his wife, actress Susan Wands (“Dancing at Lughnasa” at Pittsburgh Public Theater), reminded him, “Playing roles like this is the reason you became an actor.”
In Denver last year, Mr. Petkoff played another dark demanding role — the lead in Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.”
“I love Jeanine’s music for many of the reasons I love Sondheim’s music,” he said. “He absolutely, and Jeanine absolutely, thinks about what the character’s journey is, and how do I write music that is as complex, as layered as the person. So you don’t sing, ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ My final song of the show is called ‘Edges of the World,’ and it is fraught with edges. He’s going back and forth in his mind about all these different things, and the music reflects that beautifully and challengingly.”
Songs range from a spirited pop number to a ballad with a much lighter touch, medium Alison’s “I’m Changing My Major to Joan,” in which she finds first love with a college classmate.
“Audiences love it,” Mr. Petkoff said. “It’s hilarious and filled with that awkward teenage sense of discovery. The actress who plays it, Abby Corrigan, is brilliant in doing it.”
Mr. Petkoff admitted to being “a little nervous,” about audience reactions outside of New York. But as the show has traveled from city to city, “The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “I think it’s due to the fact that Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori have, in adapting Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, created a story that is incredibly human, that anyone with even the slightest bit of empathy in their body will respond to.”
Adult Alison explains her father’s fate at the opening of the show — she believes he committed suicide, although his death in the path of a truck was ruled an accident.
Audience members have approached the actor to talk about suicide in their families.
“In one case, the gentleman had come to the show twice, because he felt it had portrayed this so real and so beautifully. That’s very meaningful, when you think that theater can heal,” he said.
Others have told him of being married to women for many years before they had the courage to come out.
“Your heart breaks that people live in a society where they feel it’s more important to be something safe than live who they really are,” he said.
For anyone who might be put off by some of “Fun Home’s” subjects, “I would want to stress that it’s not just a dark journey,” Mr. Petkoff said. “It’s about this family that’s as genuine a family as their own. I challenge anyone to sit through the hour and 35 minutes that this play lasts and not be moved in some way.”