‘Fun Home’ a knockout in a smaller house
After “Hamilton,” “Fun Home” is the best new musical of the new millennium.
That’s reason aplenty to celebrate Madisonbased Forward Theater Company’s recent announcement that it will stage the Wisconsin premiere of “Fun Home” next season, with Tonywinning Karen Olivo in the cast.
But the news gets even better.
Having previously seen “Fun Home” in larger houses on Broadway and then on its national tour, I can offer first-hand testimony that this extraordinary show — adapted by lyricist Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori from the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel — plays even better in an intimate space like Forward’s Playhouse Theatre, which seats just under 350.
That’s because I’ve now seen the excellent, currently running production of “Fun Home” being directed by Gary Griffin in Chicago’s 299seat home to Victory Gardens Theater.
“Fun Home” is the wrenching but also offbeat, surprisingly funny story of how Bechdel discovered she was gay shortly before her closeted father killed himself.
But it’s also a moving exploration of the mystery of family, in which people who know each other best often have the hardest time communicating what they feel. Especially in a world — true of young Alison’s 1970s and in 2017 — where conforming pressures to project the perfect family get in the way of being honest with ourselves and our loved ones.
That makes all the more heartbreaking those rare moments when a man as repressed as Bruce Bechdel (a tortured Rob Lindley) can express the father’s love he clearly feels as he interacts with each of the three versions of Alison — a 10-year-old child, a 19-year-old college student, and the 43-year-old narrating this story — he encounters here.
Shamed and consumed by urges he can’t control, Bruce can be a raging bully; one feels deeply for his sometimes cowed children and longsuffering wife (beautifully played by understudy Anne Sheridan Smith in the performance I saw).
But Lindley is also the most sympathetic of the Bruces I’ve seen; aided by Victory Gardens’ cozy confines, one can see how badly he wants to connect, if he only could figure out how.
When he does — as happens most vividly when he hoists young Alison above him while they “play airplane” — the experience is literally uplifting. Like Alison, we imagine all Bruce might have been if he’d learned to fly. Like Alison, we appreciate all this troubled soul did to aid her own eventual flight.
“Fun Home” continues through Nov. 19 at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. For tickets, visit victorygardens.org/. For a longer version of this article covering additional Chicago productions, go to Tap Milwaukee.com.