BWW EXCLUSIVE: 5 SONGS BY... Jeanine Tesori On FUN HOME

By: Pat Cerasaro May. 28, 2015

BroadwayWorld recently kicked off a brand new feature series spotlighting the best and brightest songwriters on Broadway and beyond with their own personally chosen quintet of songs that hold special meaning to them, titled 5 SONGS BY....

Today we continue the 5 SONGS BY... series by talking to 2015 Tony Award nominee Jeanine Tesori all about her acclaimed score composed along with lyricist Lisa Kron for one of the most awards nominated new shows of the season, FUN HOME. Opening up about the development of the score over the last several years, Tesori shines a light on some of the most memorable musical moments in the show based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel as well as selects some of her personal favorite details about the compositions. Additionally, Tesori recounts the delicate process in shaping the uniquely compelling material and honing a final version of the score for Broadway following its successful run Off-Broadway at the Public Theater last year.
More information on FUN HOME is available at the official site here.
"Ring Of Keys"
"That was one of the first full songs I wrote for FUN HOME. What I try to do when I start working on a new piece is to ground something - I don't want to take on something that is going to be very complicated and perhaps move the form around, because I don't want to move the form around unless the form should be moved. It's hard. So, I try to pick a lullaby or something that is really direct where you just know it is, 'Boom, boom, boom.' And, so, 'Ring Of Keys' was a very clear moment that stuck out when we were spotting - you see, the structure of the piece eluded us for a long time, so we created content first and then the structure was dictated by the content. And, we did a lot of that. So, 'Ring Of Keys' was, I believe, the second thing that we did - the first was the, 'Daddy / Hey, daddy' section because I just wanted to start finding voices and ranges; there were just so many choices to be made on what kind of musical we were making. It was very, very unclear for a very long time. So, that song was pretty straight ahead."

"Come To The Fun Home"
"I loved the Jackson 5 as a kid and I loved all of those families that did all of that kind of singing - The Cowsills, The King Family, The Osmonds, The Partridge Family; there were a lot of them! And, so, basically, I just wanted to be in those groups - you see, I have three sisters and we used to do a lot of stuff together; TV was very limited and so we played board games like Monopoly, and spud, and hours and hours of kickball until we couldn't see each other anymore. Looking back, it was a great time to grow up. So, some of the things that we did were, you know, we wrote commercials and we wrote things for TV and we did magic shows and all of that stuff. So, the first song that Lisa [Kron] and I wrote for that section originally had them playing space and they were all having a sort of STAR TREK moment; it was an unbelievably long song and I remember thinking, 'Oh, God. This is way too Byzantine! It's gotta be short and sweet like a commercial.' So, we laughed a lot and tried to come up with what they should be doing in this song - we tried to show how detached the kids who grow up in funeral homes can be from the symbolism and solemnity; they are not attached to anything because it is all stuff that is commonplace for them and that they are around everyday. So, we wanted it to be a one-two punch: we knew that by that point the audience would need a breather - not something that they would have to really listen to; something that they could just be with - and we also wanted to dramatize that this was an everyday occurrence - the way that they grew up - so therefore there would be a detachment when their father died that would be super-odd. The father would be viewed by his own children when he died the same way that he viewed many people in the town when they died - and that is a very odd thing. Also, in researching this show, I talked to a lot of people who grew up in funeral homes and that helped a lot, as well."

"The Lord Moves In Mysterious Ways"
"We had a very typical funereal-sounding song that was in the show at one point that had some of that organ sound that you would recognize hearing at a wake at a funeral home that was called 'The Lord Moves In Mysterious Ways', but we had to be really economical - when you have a show like this that is an hour and a half, anything that happens onstage has to be absolutely necessary. So, we cut that song after the lab. If I was going to talk about a cut song for FUN HOME, that would be the one."
"Edges Of The World"
"'Edges Of The World' was one of the hardest ones to do because it was so hard to figure out how. We knew intellectually about how many parallels there were between them, of course - he was restoring something, she was restoring something; and, the fact that they are both artists. And, he had the language of restoration and therefore that is what would bring him to wonder about whether or not he could live a certain kind of life - by wondering if he could actually do the repairs on this actual house. You know, he was not a conscious man - he was a charming man; a smart man; a funny man - but he didn't have that wherewithal to say, 'What am I doing? Why am I doing this?' and that's why we kept saying that lyric about 'Why am I still standing here? Why can't I move?' when his life is falling apart. So, he takes on an absolutely ramshackle house and he is going to bring it back to life - and, when we say bring it back to life, when you see the pictures of the actual house and the ones that Alison shared with us, you see that it was really a museum; and not only a museum, but it was positively filled with objects that were in pristine form. There was no room - just chockablock filled with stuff. We actually had an earlier song in that place that he sang with Roy where he went back and forth about his desire for Roy and showed his teaching him about Fitzgerald. That song was also in the lab, but I knew in my gut that it didn't work - it was really sort of a showpiece for an actor versus what his subtext actually was. I remember Michael [Cerveris] looked at me with a certain look in his eyes when we were discussing it during the lab and I said to him, 'I know it doesn't work. We know it. We'll work on it,' so, instead, that became the library scene."

"Telephone Wire"
"The panels of the graphic novel are very clear and I studied them as if they were animatics - you see, when you do an animation movie like I have done six or seven times, and I love doing them, the animators will put up very rudimentary drawings; you know, the horse approaches the horizon. Then, they flip them really quickly so you can see the images in motion - like a flip-book. I feel like that was like what some of the cells Alison was drawing were - that was the scene; the way his hands grip the steering wheel and the way they are seated and the awkward pauses. There were some moments that were really clear that they should be sung - and that was a really clear sung moment for us all along. I tried to integrate the sound of the road and the tires into it, too - the 'Ba-dum, ba-dum,' sound. I also tried to integrate the clock ticking, too."

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