Upsetting the balance
Musical contrasts uncomfortable images with coming-out euphoric feeling
“Fun Home,” the big Tony-winning Broadway musical of 2015, can be a tricky emotional balancing act. In trying to give equal time to its most distressed characters, TheaterWorks often upsets that balance, taking a lot of the fun out of “Fun Home.” But the show’s themes — the need to be oneself, the need to communicate — still shine through.
Jeanine Tesori’s beautiful score still soars with a small ensemble that makes sure the violin and cello get heard. There are special moments of beauty and drama to behold here, but they’re scattered randomly and don’t line up well.
“Fun Home” is about the intersecting issues that consume a creatively inclined Indiana family, some of whose members are harboring big secrets. The father, Bruce, is a home preservationist and interior decorator (as well as a high school English teacher and a funeral director) who’s hiding his affairs with young men. (He’s played with suave 1970s style here by TV and theater star Aaron Lazar.) The mother, Helen, a community theater actress and musician (played the divine Christiane Noll), is increasingly affected by Bruce’s behavior and has become withdrawn and angry.
Alison, a cartoonist, is shown as a child (“Small Alison,” confidently played and very well sung by Skylar Lynn Matthews) and as the adult narrator of the whole show (the furrowed-browed Sarah Beth Pfeifer from Broadway’s “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical”), but the character’s biggest moments happen to the teenaged “Medium Alison” (Julia Nightingale, whose vulnerable youthfulness is magnetically appealing amid the intensity of everyone else). Medium Alison comes out as a lesbian in college just before her father apparently commits suicide. These aren’t spoilers: Alison reveals all this just a few minutes into the trim 95-minute show.
“Fun Home” also features Alison’s two siblings as young children (with Myles Low as Christian, Sam Duncan as John through the weekend and Jasper Johns as John for the final two weeks of the run). The fake commercial the kids create for the family funeral home is one of the truly fun moments of “Fun Home,” and this one is an elaborately choreographed boogie-down workout for the adorable tykes.
The object of Alison’s affections, celebrated in the song “I’m Changing My Major (to Joan),” is Cameron Silliman. The college relationship is convincingly portrayed, and the scene where Alison brings Joan home to meet her parents is one of the strongest sections of this “Fun Home” and one of the only times the cast works strongly together as an ensemble.
There’s also one other actor (Ali Louis Bourzgui, who’s got a killer smirk) playing all of Bruce’s various conquests, not to mention a dream-induced David Cassidy lookalike.
Most productions of “Fun Home” make sure everything revolves around Alison — after all, it’s her story, based on the graphic novel memoirs of the real-life cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who gave us not just the weekly comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” and other graphic novels but also coined the film criticism rubric “The Bechdel Test.”
At TheaterWorks, we’re reminded that every grownup member of the family gets a big song to themselves. That shouldn’t mean, however, that they should upstage or undercut Alison’s story. Even Bruce, whose
closeted behavior is meant to directly contrast his daughter’s embrace of her own homosexuality, and who gets a lot of attention in the show, shouldn’t ultimately detract from Alison’s narrative.
Here, he does. Lazar’s aloof or antagonist attitude towards the other family members isn’t tempered with anything communal. He stands apart, as if he has his own little show going on. Since the role of Helen is rather underwritten in the musical (as it is in the graphic novel: her voice is heard more fully in Bechdel’s later memoir “Are You My Mother?”), blending in isn’t such a problem for Christiane Noll, who nails her two songs “Helen’s Etude” and “Days and Days” and otherwise fits neatly into the ensemble.
Even when Alison is front and center, a key song of hers, “Telephone Wire,” is botched. The tempo is rushed, the sitting-in-acar staging is forced, the lighting’s too bright and the mimed steering wheel is distracting and Pfeifer brings almost no gravitas or subtext to the lyrics, which are meant to be about the petrifying inability to start a necessary conversation but here might as well just be about seeing trees from a car. There’s an excitability to the number that most other productions strive carefully to avoid. A stark, distraught moment is ruined.
There are a lot of things this production does right. Bechdel’s coming-out at college was rendered realistically and leisurely in the memoir but was turned into a slew of lesbian stereotypes in the musical. Just by tweaking some of the cliches, this version restores a sense of realness to the relationship.
Oddly, giving more characters their own depth and gravity and focus makes “Fun Home” strangely flat. The scenes inform each other and contrast each other as they should, but there’s no fluidity, no continuity, no suspense, no back-and-forth or giveand-take.
Another drawback is the pesky little theater tricks used to keep the action moving. There’s a moving floor along the back of the stage that whisks actors and furniture on and off at a brisk clip that doesn’t fit with the dramatic mood that the actors set. Many props are mimed or invisible, from a piano to a dead body, and can get irritating.
“Fun Home” is set in the 1970s, and costume designer Herin Kaputkin is the designer who captures that best, but even the bright leisure suits and flared jeans she provides can’t overcome the drab feel that overwhelms this “Fun Home.” The show also lacks the pep of Bechdel’s cartoons.
TheaterWorks’ “Fun Home” works best if you perceive it as a series of separate set pieces: a closeted man’s struggles, an out college student’s joy and freedom, the wild creativity of children, the tense encounters of children and parents. Taken in pieces, there are striking moments. But ultimately this production is as disconnected as its troubled characters, and the few instances of buoyant revelation are sucked into a swirl of moping.