Home is Where the Heart Breaks

Fun Home at Circle in the Square

 

(L-R): Beth Malone, Sydney Lucas, and Michael Cerveris in Fun Home.

            Fun Home, an exquisite little jewel of a musical now playing at the Circle in the Square Theatre, has had a long journey to Broadway.  Workshopped several times from 2009 to 2011, the final, revamped version of the play premiered at the Public Theatre (which, having gifted the world in the past year and a half with both Fun Home and Hamilton, has cemented itself as the centerpiece of a new golden age of the off-Broadway musical) in September of 2013.  Now it has finally made its way to the Great White Way, just under the wire for Tony eligibility, and thanks are due to its incredible cast and creative team for giving this Broadway season what it had sorely lacked—a masterpiece.

            We feel Alison Bechdel, the renowned cartoonist on whose memoir the musical is based, hovering over the show.  Adult Alison (Beth Malone) is plumbing the depths of her childhood memories to discover what could have caused her closeted gay father (Michael Cerveris) to kill himself, only four months after she herself came out as gay in college.  Ms. Malone makes Alison a palpable presence, relatable and totally real.  Expanding on the theme of memory made real are Alison’s visions of her younger selves—college-aged “Middle” Alison (the astonishing Emily Skeggs) and the younger “Small” Alison (the even more astonishing Sydney Lucas, who won an Obie for this part at the age of ten, the youngest ever to do so).  The three Alisons dance around each other in a surreal symbiotic relationship made significant by the tactile direction of Sam Gold.  They are different but somehow the same, always exploring the impossibility that Alison’s father, Bruce, may not be what he seems.

            Michael Cerveris, in a groundbreaking performance, makes real the terrifying prospect that we may not even remotely know our parents.  Bruce Bechdel is a decorator, an English teacher, and, most symbolically significant, a funeral director (the Bechdel family funeral home is nicknamed the “fun home,” thus the title).  His control over his work, however, does not quite translate to his home life.  His genteel delicacy breaks not obviously or campily but gently, cracking the veneer only slightly, which makes the whole thing only more existentially disturbing.  We are not sure what to think of Bruce Bechdel because Alison never was and still isn’t, and therein lies the central issue of the play.  All families try to bury their imperfections behind a façade, as Bruce does with his personal passion, historical preservation—his wife, Helen (Judy Kuhn, lovely) calls their house a “museum”—but nothing hides the kind of repression and angst Bruce, and for that matter Alison, had boiling beneath the surface.  It is a truth reached with a beautiful artistic clarity, rendered in one of the most dramatically significant musicals I’ve ever seen.

            The score, redolent of Yorkey and Kitt’s Next to Normal in its complexity and emotional depth, comes courtesy of a newcomer—Lisa Kron, a playwright who wrote both the book and her first lyrics—and an old hand—Jeanine Tesori, perhaps the greatest female Broadway composer of all time, who is responsible for Violet, Caroline, or Change, Shrek the Musical, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.  The songs form a specific and well-focused backbone for the show, ranging from devastating domestic tragedy (“Telephone Wire,” when Alison and her father find themselves unable to communicate on their last night together, leaves the audience in tears) to fantasy pastiche (“Come to the Fun Home,” a fake Jackson Five-style commercial starring the Bechdel children, is a perfect showcase for the breathtaking Ms. Lucas and the shockingly talented Oscar Williams and Zell Steele Morrow, playing her younger brothers—who knew child actors like these existed?).  When the score starts to hit its stride around the third song, there won’t be a heart in the house that isn’t broken this musical was robbed of a Pulitzer.

            Though the show loses something in its transition to staging in the round, it isn’t enough to distract from the fact that there is not one false note in any of the perfect performances or the deeply felt story, let alone the score (by far Ms. Tesori’s best).   There were two original musicals on Broadway this season of any significance whatsoever—this one and Jason Robert Brown’s Honeymoon in Vegas.  There was one original musical on Broadway that can be called art of the highest order, and that’s Fun Home.  You can see it and learn something about yourself, or miss it and regret it for the rest of your life.