Fun Home Broadway Reviews

'Fun Home' is a thoroughly dynamic piece that is just as emotionally piercing, good-humored and enjoyable as it is sharp, focused and culturally conscious. It belongs on the list of the smartest, most innovative musicals written in the Sondheim tradition of the past decade, such as 'Spring Awakening,' 'Next to Normal' and 'The Scottsboro Boys.'

The hidden strength of the show is Judy Kuhn (of LES MISERABLES and Chess), as the mother Helen. Helen seems almost invisible in this family, her true self having dwindled over the course of the marriage. Late in the show, she is revealed to have been very much aware of the situation all along; but what could she do other than sit at the piano, passively practicing Chopin? 'Chaos never happens if it's never seen,' she repeatedly notes. Finally comes her song, which illuminates the show.

As in the plays's 2013 run at the Public Theater, the cast is excellent. The Alisons all shine in solo moments. Sydney Lucas, the youngest, unlocks what she's feeling when she sings 'Keys.' Emily Skeggs, the coed, embraces her sexuality with the delightful 'Changing My Major.' Beth Malone surveys the dimension of her dad's life in the wistful 'Maps.' As the bedeviled Bruce, Michael Cerveris delivers an even greater emotional payoff than before. As his long-suffering wife, Helen, the exquisite Judy Kuhn is indelible as she sings of her life with conditioned dry-eyed composure.

It's a brilliant restaging, one that seats us just behind Alison's wary adult eye as she remembers life with father. Although there's no showbiz milieu depicted here, 'Fun Home' is to fathers what 'Gypsy' is to mothers, and Kron and Tesori have created a daddy Bruce (Michael Cerveris) who is every bit as vivid and controlling (and ultimately out of control) as Mama Rose.

Could a musical focusing on a lesbian cartoonist whose closeted father kills himself fly on Broadway? For anyone who saw Fun Home during its run downtown at the Public Theater last season, that's a rhetorical question. From the start, this adaptation ofAlison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic novel had all the earmarks of a contemporary hit: topical subject matter, a wittily irreverent but emotionally compelling book and score (by composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist/librettist Lisa Kron), and characters who are at once intriguingly idiosyncratic and instantly accessible.

I already thought that Fun Home was the best new musical of the year in 2013, when it opened at the Public Theater. It's hard to imagine that its Broadway transfer, and transformation, will not make it the best of this season as well. I say 'transformation' even though in most ways it's nearly a replica: The librettist Lisa Kron has perhaps cut or tightened a few lines of dialogue, and the composer Jeanine Tesori, apart from excising one charming but redundant little song ('Al for Short'), has made only the kind of changes a fanatic would notice. Fun Home is still basically what it was when I reviewed it in 2013: the story, based on Alison Bechdel's autobiographical graphic memoir, of a lesbian cartoonist trying in middle age to understand her father, who killed himself shortly after revealing to her that he, too, was gay. Back then I called it 'hilarious and crushing,' and it remains so now. Maybe less hilarious and more crushing.

The brilliant show, which opened on Sunday at the Circle in the Square after an extended run at the off-Broadway Public Theater, suggests that families - in this case the Bechdels of small-town Pennsylvania - are very complicated assemblages, made up of individuals with private dreams, sorrows and secrets

New! Fresh! Original! We toss those kudos around a lot in this business. (It's like calling everyone 'darling.') But 'Fun Home' really earns the praise. Lisa Kron, who wrote both book and lyrics, assembles words and images in unexpected ways to dramatize the bittersweet memoir (based on the 2006 graphic novel by Alison Bechdel) of a grown woman remembering the troubled father she loved in spite of himself. Sam Gold's direction brings lucidity to the complex mechanics of staging a story that takes place in three time frames. And Jeanine Tesori's haunting music doesn't sound a bit like anyone else's music.

All three Alisons share the same refreshing kind of naturalism, and each actress makes the part her own without showboating or selling the story's knottier sentiments short to reach the cheap seats. A little bit of nuance inevitably gets lost when subject matter this dark is set to song; death and deep family schisms, after all, aren't always fit for jazz hands. But like the book, Fun Home manages to use an oft-unserious medium to deliver something seriously, singularly moving.

The show is heady with mood-shifting music by Jeanine Tesori and an ingratiating, unflinching book by lyricist Lisa Kron. Moving back and forth in time, we relive the conflicting family dynamics with Alison -- played here by three terrific actresses of different ages -- who comes out as a lesbian just four months before her increasingly erratic father, a closeted gay man, kills himself.

But most important is the music, a career high for Ms. Tesori ('Violet,' 'Caroline, or Change'), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer. (John Clancy did the nuanced orchestrations.) The music is woven so intricately into Ms. Kron's time-juggling script that you'll find yourself hard pressed to recall what exactly was said and what was sung.

Cerveris - no doubt with the help of the director, Sam Gold, whose storytelling has surety and sensitivity - figured out that the way to play Bruce was the opposite of the obvious choice of a repressed, bottled-up man. Cerveris, whose performance is deeply disturbing in all the right ways, shows you a man acting out constantly, a man whose denial of self has meant excessive hunger for stimuli of all kinds.

Jeanine Tesori's music still resonates (the sharp-as-a-razor book is by Lisa Kron). Crowd-pleasing comic turns have Small Alison and her brothers (Oscar Williams and Zell Steele Morrow, both talented mop-tops) imagining a TV commercial for the 'Fun Home.' In a fantasy sequence, Lucas recasts the people in her orbit as members of The Partridge Family.

It has only gotten better in its theater-in-the-round format, with director Sam Gold using every inch of the stage and even the aisles. Furniture - sinks, doors and coffins - by designer David Zinn pops up from below the stage and sofas, a car and a bed are spun about. In a play that lingers on death, sometimes the show just has actors onstage amid empty spaces, the voids speaking volumes. (Zinn also nails the '70s costumes, from bowl cuts to awkward plaid to the ill-fitting pants.)

A memory musical, as haunted and haunting as The Glass Menagerie, thanks to Kron's quicksilver script and lyrics and the music by Tesori (Violet, Shrek, Caroline, Or Change), whose work merges the experimentalism and euphony that suffuse the best of Sondheim; the only other contemporary composer in this vein was the late Jonathan Larson (Rent).

And aside from a couple of upbeat, spot-on pastiches of the Jackson 5 and the Partridge Family, Tesori's score is a comforting blanket of acousti-pop. In this rather daring project, a final anthem about flying seems rather old-fashioned. Still, 'Fun Home' is an important show. That it managed to make it to Broadway at all is a reason to rejoice.

Perhaps the most over-trafficked subject matter among contemporary American dramatists is the dysfunctional family. So one of the many wonders of the haunting musical Fun Home is the unique perspective it brings to that theme, in a deeply personal story that marries the specificity of individual experience with an emotional universality that will find echoes in many of our lives.