Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
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music by Jeanine Tesori, book & lyrics by Lisa Kron, directed by Robert McQueen
The Musical Stage Company, CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge Street, Toronto
April 17-May 20, 2018
Alison: “Everything is balanced and serene
Like chaos never happens if it’s never seen”
Fun Home is a poignant musical, beautifully written and filled with moving performances from its top-notch cast. The musical is based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 memoir written in graphic novel format about her own coming out as a lesbian and her surprise at discovering that her father is a closeted homosexual. Lisa Kron’s book and lyrics treat the subject with sympathy and warm-heartedness though any of the unforced humour is overshadowed by melancholy since Bechdel’s father committed suicide. This is hardly the usual subject matter of a Broadway musical, but it is so beautifully written that it won numerous awards including the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. The Musical Stage Company presents the work with such sensitivity that it is a must-see for any serious lover of music theatre.
In the musical three actors play Alison Bechdel at different ages. The frame for the musical is that the middle-aged Alison Bechdel, known simply as “Alison” (Laura Condlln), is in the process of writing her memoir and as she works episodes of the past, not necessarily in chronological order, crop up giving her the chance to reflect and comment upon them. The key times she focusses on are when she was 10 and called “Small Alison” (Hannah Levinson) in the programme, and when she was 19 in university and called “Medium Alison” (Sara Farb) in the programme. Alison sees her time as Small Alison as a generally happy time for the family but notes now as an adult that even at ten she had inklings of what the future would hold. Medium Alison experiences a turbulent time. One the one hand is her difficult and finally joyful realization of her sexuality and her coming out to her parents. On the other hand is learning about her father’s hidden sexuality and noticing how it has embittered her mother Helen (Cynthia Dale) and how keeping the secret is undermining the superficially placid life of her father Bruce (Evan Buliung).
Alison’s father is an English teacher at the local high school, but he also runs the funeral home that he inherited from his father. Hence, the title of the play, since “Fun Home” is the family’s own phrase for the funeral home.
The cast that the Musical Stage Company has gathered for Fun Home is superb. Laura Condlln may be best known for her acting but she also has a warm, soothing singing voice. The way that Condlln can mingle tones of humour, sadness, embarrassment and regret in a single phrase is ideal for the character of the middle-aged Alison and captures the complex tone of the show in general. Her duet “Telephone Wire” with Bruce is a touching study of two people trying but failing to communicate.
Evan Buliung gives what must be his best ever performance in a musical. Around his family Buliung makes Bruce appear preoccupied and absent-minded, caring of his children though neglectful of his wife. It is when Bruce is alone with a young man that Buliung reveals Bruce’s apparent nonchalance as a thin veil for his desire and desperation. Buliung lends his rugged voice to Bruce’s final song “Edges of the World” that powerfully expresses the character’s conflicts.
Sara Farb is very sympathetic as Medium Alison, the character who experiences the greatest change in her life. Farb wonderfully conveys Medium Alison’s awkwardness in being away from home for the first time and in coming to terms with her sexuality. In the character’s song after her first ever same-sex encounter, Farb beautifully pours out Alison’s surprised joyfulness in the show’s best-known number “Changing My Major”. Farb also realistically portrays Medium Alison’s growing frustration when her parents don’t respond her to coming out letter and then when their response avoids the subject. When Medium Alison hears that her father is gay, Farb effectively captures Alison’s conflicting response of bliss at her own coming out but distress at learning of the closeted life her father leads.
Cynthia Dale gives a complex performance as Helen, whose general coldness starkly contrasts with the warmth of Buliung’s Bruce. The first glimpse behind this coldness is when Helen forces herself to play the piano in the song “Helen’s Etude” when she knows Bruce is seducing a young man elsewhere in the house. When Dale’s Helen finally unburdens to Medium Alison all the secrets about Bruce that she has been hiding since the start of her marriage, it is as if a verbal torrent has been unleashed with Helen unable to stop herself even when she has given Alison enough damning evidence of Bruce’s continuing infidelities and her efforts to pretend that everything is fine. Helen finally gives voice to her pain in the great song “Days and Days” that Dale delivers with great passion.
One of the main delights of the show is how well the three Bechdel children are portrayed – Hannah Levinson as Small Alison, Jasper Lincoln as the older brother Christian and Liam MacDonald as the younger brother John. The song that allows the three to show themselves off at their best as a group is “Come to the Fun Home”, a witty number where the three pretend they are recording an upbeat commercial for the funeral home.
Levinson, who previously demonstrated amazing talent as one of the three Matildas in Matilda The Musical, shows equally amazing maturity in one so young in Fun Home. She gives a strong performance of “Raincoat of Love” when Small Alison imagines what a perfect family would be, but communicates surprising complexity in “Ring of Keys”, where Small Alison tries to understand why she finds a stereotypically butch delivery woman somehow inspiring.
In other roles Sabryn Rock radiates self-assuredness and sensuality as Joan, Medium Alison’s first love. The hunky Eric Morin plays five different young men most of whom are objects of Bruce’s desire who react to his advances with feelings of ranging from suspicion to enthusiasm.
Director Robert McQueen establishes the right pace for the show so that it moves smoothly but not so quickly as to inhibit reflection. Rebecca Picherack’s lighting indicates the differences between past and present and is key to understanding the place of action on Camellia’s Koo’s set that shows three locations simultaneously.
Fun Home is a musical in the post-Sondheimian mold of composers like Adam Guettel and Jason Robert Brown who feel that musicals should take on serious subject matter and that their music should be as free to be as complex as that subject matter. In Fun Home spoken word often imperceptibly gives way to song so that few of the songs feel like separate numbers and more like heightened expressions of emotion, which, after all, is what song is. This is an endearing musical, important in its subject matter surely, but also important in its sensitive explorations of character and family. So lovingly staged by The Musical Stage Company, this is a show that no lover of musical theatre, or indeed of theatre in general, should miss.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: (from top) Sara Farb as Medium Alison, Hannah Levinson as Small Alison and Laura Condlln as Alison; Liam MacDonald, Jasper Lincoln and Hannah Levinson. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com/shows/fun-home.
2018-04-18
Fun Home