Fun Home

Alison Bechdel (Lucy Maunder) is a cartoonist, writing an autobiographical graphic novel – and so we travel with her, a ghost witness to her past.  It is a story about an American family – a family uniquely unhappy in its own way.  Alison always carries her sketch pad as she watches, and, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with regret, or embarrassment, sometimes with pain, records each memory.  As they become drawings, she asks, ‘Caption?  Caption…?’  And she is stopped, as stumped as we are because no simple caption could be adequate.

There’s Alison’s precocious nine-year-old self (Sophie Isaac on opening night) with her brothers (Jai D’Alessandro and Sebastian Sero), emerging from a coffin and pretending to make a (hilarious) song-and-dance commercial for their father’s funeral home.  And there’s goofy nineteen-year-old Alison (Ursula Searle) at college, and the comedy of her trepidatiously discovering her sexuality with her pal Joan (Emily Havea) – and then almost exploding with joy, in celebration of new-found sensuality. 

But as much as this is the story of Alison, it is also the story of her father Bruce (Adam Murphy), a man who loves his children but has no idea how to talk to them – so he educates them instead.  He’s an academic and teacher, a restorer of ‘historic houses’, and a funeral director who does his own embalming.  Ceaseless activity to hide the crucial fact that he’s a closeted gay man.  His ‘secret’ affairs with men and boys – such as handyman Roy (Euan Fistrovic Doidge) - translate into rage and shame, a front of rigid conservatism about art and literature, and a hectoring, pompous authoritarianism with his oblivious children.  And there is the on-going heartbreak of his wife Helen (Silvie Paladino), who knows all along.   

Fun Home rises far above most music theatre shows.  One could run out of superlatives describing it.  It has a complex, powerful, and moving story to tell – and it tells that story without confusion, moving smoothly and seamlessly through three time frames – a feat helped by Alicia Clements’ superb set (one of the best uses of the revolve I’ve seen), her costumes, Matt Scott’s lighting and Nick Walker’s sound design.  Director Dean Bryant maintains energy and momentum without ever sacrificing detail and nuance.

Mathew Frank is the musical director and with his six musicians gives up music and the songs that advance the narrative at every point, and reveal feelings of exuberant delight, poignant reflection, frustration, anger and misery, and the deepest, saddest irony.

Here is a show that has characters of depth and subtlety, and that feel like real people.  The story has comedy, the heights of happiness and the depths of suffering – yet never softening the telling with that familiar sentimentality.  It is a most skilful adaptation of the real Alison Bechdel’s funny, ironic, and painfully honest graphic novel.

All is delivered to us by an exceptional cast, every one of them just right – including the children, who are breathtakingly good.  On opening night, the show received a spontaneous standing ovation from an audience that had been held throughout.  It is no mystery why this show received seven Tony Awards.

Please do not miss Fun Home.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jeff Busby

BUY THE SCRIPT HERE.