Erin Harrington reviews Fun Home, music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, directed by Kathleen Burns, with musical direction from Caelan Thomas, at the Court Theatre, Saturday 10 August 2024.
The Tony award-winning one act musical Fun Home is adapted from cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s beloved 2006 graphic memoir, which explores her childhood growing up in small town Pennsylvania in a funeral home in the 1970s, and her coming-of-age as she comes to terms with her lesbian identity as a young adult. This is a dual exercise in understanding; the musical opens with big Alison (Kelly Hocking), now 43, trying to reconcile her own history with her memories of her volatile, complicated father Bruce, played beautifully with charm and prickly vulnerability by Michael Lee Porter. Bruce is gay and closeted, with a preference for much younger men. He sublimates his shame, frustration and desire by pouring his energies into restoring their lavish Victorian home, berating the whole family into helping maintain this polished performance of control and perfection. We learn almost immediately that he killed himself by stepping in front of a truck when Alison – here, ‘medium’ Alison (Emma Katene) – was in college, right at the point of her own coming out. Alison, today, tries to pin down her memories through drawings and captions, but something’s always sitting just out of frame. The show asks – how do we process the past, and see our parents with our own adult eyes?
It all sounds pretty grim, but Fun Home recognises that grief, and memory, can be funny and capricious, with joy and sadness co-existing. The Court Theatre’s New Zealand premiere production, led by director Kathleen Burns and MD Caelan Thomas, finds a careful balance between humour and pathos. After all, there’s not that many shows where a scene about embalming might be offset by a glittery fantasy musical number inspired by the Brady Bunch.
We see small Alison (Carla Ladstaetter) and her brothers John (Franklin Domigan) and Christian (Erik Misnyovszki) growing up in the immense, ornate home, making their own fun amongst silk-lined caskets and dusty books. Their upbeat bop “Come to the Fun Home”, with great movement from choreographer Hillary Moulder, is an absolute delight. The child actors, who will play the season in turnabout with Eden Taylor, Ben Cumberpatch and Barnaby Domigan, are honestly astoundingly good. Ladstaetter, as small Alison, holds the stage, anchoring (and opening!) the show with the confidence of an adult pro. Kudos to both the Court Theatre and Showbiz for giving these actors opportunities to develop their craft in earlier shows (particularly Matilda and Frozen Jr.), and to Amy Straker, the young performers’ coach.
Middle Alison’s budding relationship with queer punk hottie Joan (Lilly Bourne) gives us one of the show’s funniest, most heartfelt moments (“Changing My Major”), and Isaac Pawson balances a number of important supporting roles with grace and humour. Long-suffering mother, actress Helen, cuts a more tragic figure. Juliet Reynolds-Midgley’s raw rendition of the bittersweet, angry lament “Days” is for me the most affecting musical moment of the show, outside of its moving final sequence.
The graphic novel explores the relationship of Alison and her father through a non-linear, looping structure that evokes the elusive nature of memory. It draws from slippery points of recollection, anecdote, literary allusion (lots of shared reading of Joyce and Proust) and tangible artefacts like letters, diaries and photos to try to build a picture of their lives, lived both together and out of sync.
The adaptation to musical theatre makes physical this sense of splitting, as small and medium Alison’s lives, and fantasies, play out through vignettes. All the while big Alison, often positioned above or to the side of action – until she’s not – tries to capture the past in pen and ink, and in doing so perhaps discern some sort of clear, understandable narrative. The show’s recurrent musical motif, a cheery arpeggio that bounces between reeds and strings, gives us these separate voices, all trying to come into coherence. Importantly, the musical also lets us hear more directly from Bruce, or perhaps big Alison’s reverse engineering of Bruce, and to see scenes that might be representations of the truth, or distillations of hearsay. It’s an effective and deeply humane approach.
The broad set recalls the immense parlour of the funeral home, all William Morris wallpaper, tinkling chandeliers and waxed mahogany. Two raised platforms – a fussy sitting room, Alison’s studio – and a pull-out bed for middle Alison’s college dorm give some differentiation in levels and setting. Flicking through the programme, I am really struck (and pleased) by the fact that the production team is almost entirely women. The show is as well designed as you’d expect from the Court – I particularly enjoy Alison’s costuming, especially in light of her mini dyke awakening in the song “Keys” – but I become deeply frustrated with imbalances in the sound mixing. Some songs are complex and vocally challenging, with staccato vocal lines hopping over one another and crossing lines of dialogue. The vocals are sometimes so muddy, or obscured by the band, that I frequently struggle to discern lyrics – even in songs in which people are singing in unison or in a more lyric mode. I find this to be a recurring complaint at the Court, and there’s only so much good diction can do.
The opening night audience absolutely loves Fun Home and are quickly on their feet. This week in politics has been frustrating, as we’ve heard, yet again, the boorish and frankly boring line that the arts are a frivolous distracting nice-to-have, but shows like this show exactly how vital music and storytelling are. (I saw one of our local National MPs in the audience, and maybe he can feed that back). In a world where there’s lots of safe choices, and where bums on seats are key to keeping the lights on, I also appreciate that (as with the hit summer run of Something Rotten!) the theatre has been willing to offer Ōtautahi audiences contemporary shows that might be a little less familiar. Hopefully audiences will repay that generosity and adventurousness back in kind.
Fun Home plays until 14 September 2024.
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