Quirky show that tugs the heartstrings
SOME may present the Young Vic’s new musical Fun Home as a coming-out, coming-ofage tale of an American ‘lesbian cartoonist’ (as she calls herself). The show is more universal than that.
It is a story about fatherhood, of a distant dad who was not capable of easy communication with his lively daughter.
Few things touch the emotions more than emotional repression and this inventive, restrained production is, consequently, tremendously moving. I loved it.
Is that because cartoonist Alison Bechdel, whose story this is, is the same vintage as me? That maybe helps. We watch Alison progress from Sixties girlhood in small-town Pennsylvania to her recent adult days.
Some period touches will resonate with babyboomers: the clothes, the TV shows, the way grown-ups used to keep secrets.
In Alison’s case there was an almighty elephant in the room: her parents’ unhappy marriage and her father’s secret life.
When the day arrived for her to tell her parents she was gay, she little expected that she would be the one left reeling by an ‘outing’ — the news that her father liked men. Events are told in flashback, adult Alison (Kaisa Hammarlund) strolling the stage while her pre-teen self (an assured Brooke Haynes) and her college self (Eleanor Kane) recount life with dad (Zubin Varla in dodgy wig) and tight-lipped mum (Jenna Russell).
Sam Gold’s unfussy direction and Lisa Korn’s script do not over-milk the sadness. Jeanine Tesori’s music is unobtrusive, lending proceedings an unstuffy air.
The Bechdel family business was a funeral parlour. Less is made of this than it might be, though there is a light moment when the children hide in a coffin.
Alison records briefly in her diary the day she sees her first corpse. Underneath she conveys the important news ‘had egg salad for lunch’. Her wry understatement is not often to be had in American musicals and it is welcome. Do not go to this expecting classic musical-theatre ballads and breastbeating anguish about feelings. The Bechdels are more self-contained that that. MR VARLA lends the father a glint of madness. Miss Russell, as the mother, has little to do until a burst of ravishing unhappiness when her character recalls the ‘days and days and days’ of marital torment she endured in the family’s ‘museum’ of a house, full of antique furniture.
Young Alison has a great song when she describes the awakening of her sexuality (when she sees a butch delivery woman jangling her keys at a diner). Then comes the emotional constipation (and theatrical depth-charge) of teen Alison and her dad failing to talk meaningfully to one another before his suicide.
I thought of my own, terminally ill father trying to talk to me about his funeral arrangements, and how I deflected him, and he was relieved when I did.
Fun Home may not wow everyone. But it is done with heart and novelty and it catches the necessity of family, flawed parents and all.