Fun Home, Again (2015)

No way was I missing out on this one.  Last season’s big Tony winner is spectacular onstage.  The music is fantastic, the acting is incredible, and the production is gorgeous.  So glad I was able to see it (and that the theatre it’s playing in is awfully small for Broadway – I felt so close to the stage!)  Premise spoilers.

Quick recap.  Fun Home is the story of cartoonist Alison Bechdel writing and drawing the story of her life, specifically her difficult relationship with her father, Bruce.  The show dances back and forth among three periods of her life:  her childhood in the family funeral home under the demanding Bruce, her sexual awakening and subsequent coming-out during her first year of college, and her adult recollections as she works on her graphic memoir.  As much as it’s Alison’s tale, it’s also the tale of Bruce and how his deeply-entrenched closetedness was felt through the rest of the family.

Fine production all around.  I’m not a huge fan of theatre in the round, since it means the actors are facing you a fourth of the time at most, but I’d say that here, it’s done about as well as possible.  The relatively spare set reorients itself along with the cast, so everything/everyone is seen from pretty much every angle, and the cast is careful to spread the love among the entire 360 degrees.  And even though the set isn’t extensive, the show still does a nice job conveying the impression of the slavishly-restored Bechdel home – there are just enough fussy and pretentious decorative touches to help the mind fill in the rest of Bruce’s obsessive vision.

This may seem like an odd thing to single out, but the lighting is excellent.  So many times in the show, it’s used in inventive ways that perfectly create the desired effect without being showy about it.  Lighting contributes to the three best visually-realized scenes (in my opinion) – young Alison’s first encounter with one of the dead bodies at the funeral home, Bruce’s midnight escape during a family trip, and Bruce and Alison’s car ride near the end of the show.  Light and staging is also used magnificently in the scene before Bruce’s show-stopping “Edges of the World,” creating the sense that the family’s distractions, trappings, and ostentations are literally falling away from them, leaving nothing between them and their emotions.

The cast – oh my goodness.  Michael Cerveris is of course superb as Bruce, insecure, mercurial, and yearning.  With every word and movement, he is a man trying to convince himself that he’s living more than half a life.  Judy Kuhn (former Disney princess – the singing voice of Pocahontas, not to mention the original grown Cosette in Les Miz on Broadway) imbues long-suffering wife Helen with the full weight of her family’s secrets and charades.  And all three Alisons are pitch perfect.  Sydney Lucas, the original young Alison, isn’t with the show any longer, but Gabriella Pizzolo fills the role quite capably.  Her voice is lovely and earnest, and she beautifully plays the “something out of the place” that Alison unconsciously feels running through her home.  I feel it’s a little harder to connect with college-age Alison on the cast recording, since she only has one big song, but Emily Skaggs’s acting is so funny, honest, and aching that she won me over immediately.  So, the three Alisons are all neck-and-neck for me now.  Beth Malone, as adult Alison, steers the ship with humor and heart.  Her running commentary guides without intruding, and I love watching her face as she watches the memories of her younger selves.