Review Roundup: Public Theater's FUN HOME

The Public Theater (Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis; Executive Director, Patrick Willingham) presents the world premiere of Fun Home, directed by Sam Gold. Featuring music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, and based on Alison Bechdel book, Fun Home will run through Sunday, November 17.

The complete cast of Fun Home features Griffin Birney (Christian Bechdel), Michael Cerveris(Bruce Bechdel), Roberta Colindrez(Joan), Noah Hinsdale (John Bechdel), Judy Kuhn (Helen), Sydney Lucas(Small Alison), Beth Malone (Alison), Joel Perez (Roy), and Alexandra Socha (Medium Alison).

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Michael Dale, BroadwayWorld: So I hesitate to jump the gun and call Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori's (music) brave and adventurous new musical,Fun Home, groundbreaking, though I can't name another that deals in this kind of subject matter and successfully presents it in such a non-traditional form.

Ben Brantley, New York Times: "Children begin by loving their parents," Oscar Wilde wrote. "After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." Every phase of that epigram seems to be taking place simultaneously in "Fun Home." But this show has room for forgiveness, too. It knows that in those endless enigmas we call family, judgments are never final, and love never fades altogether. Within such uncertainty, "Fun Home" finds a shining clarity that lights up the night.

Jeremy Gerard, Bloomberg: The book and lyrics bring us into Alison's life much as the drawn images of Bechdel's book do. Tesori's music injects the show with spiritual leavening. It's closer in tone to her heartfelt Tony Kushner collaboration, "Caroline, or Change" than the genre-spanning "Violet," with its pastiche score. But the composer can still strut her comic stuff, as in a hilarious number when young Alison and her friends create a singing commercial for the funeral home. It's a reminder how full of life this house of death becomes, even in memory.

Robert Kahn, NBC New York: "Fun Home" is a clear and pointed reminder that you're not truly an adult until you've understood your parents as flawed human beings. What's left murky is what condition Alison finds herself in today. How did all this shape her ability to form close bonds? It would have been fascinating to walk away with a sharper sense of those issues. We can only guess how close to home that story would hit.

Joe Dziemianowicz, NY Daily News: Director Sam Gold ("Seminar," "The Flick"), as always, makes every moment - light, dark, disturbing - totally honest and creatively staged. He has assembled a great cast. The three Alisons are wonderful, Michael Cerveris is a marvel as the tormented Bruce, and Judy Kuhn is lump-in-your throat poignant as his long-suffering wife. Be glad you didn't live there. But this "Fun Home" is an unforgettable place to visit.

Charles McNulty, LA Times: Jeanine Tesori, a master of musical pastiche working with a broad palette here, composed the music and collaborated on the lyrics with Kron. "Fun Home" has a few splashy let-me-entertain-you numbers, including a "Partridge Family"homage invoking the author's childhood era. But the work issui generis, as much a play as a musical and not at all concerned with conforming to the expectations of either form.

Linda Winer, Newsday: Playwright-lyricist Lisa Kron, composer Jeanine Tesori and director Sam Gold create a father who is not as gnarly-dark as the one Bechdel, a Vermont-based cartoonist, said "treats children like furniture and furniture like children." Yet a more loving father (played with an exquisite blend of enthusiasms and contradictions by Michael Cerveris) never sugarcoats the wrenching differences of growing up gay in two close generations.

Marilyn Stasio, Variety: How refreshing - a queer coming-of-age play in which the hero(ine) is not a diva, the parents are not monsters, and people are never mean, even when they're being cruel. Lisa Kron's warm, funny, heartbreaking book (from the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel) for "Fun Home" accomplishes all this without being sentimental. That welcome tone of sincerity is replicated in her lyrics to Jeanine Tesori's introspective songs, which sound like a human voice - the voice of a likable lesbian, played by three actresses at different stages of her life - being painfully honest with itself.

Jesse Green, Vulture: Despite the care obviously lavished on its theoretical underpinnings, and despite its seriousness, Fun House is neither gloomy nor crabbed. At first you think it might be, with David Zinn's set mostly empty except for piles of furniture lined up at the back of the stage. Gradually, though, Bruce's dream house - his family's nightmare - assembles itself before your eyes in all its fussy glory. Similarly, director Sam Gold is willing to let the show take its time, and ride out a few longueurs, to build naturally from its own premises. Even the unusual choice to reveal the outcome of the drama nearly at the beginning - a choice that has a very different effect onstage than it does in Bechdel's novel - pays off eventually. The comedy is richer for the foreboding, and the last half-hour deepens as it hurtles toward the unbearable ending you already know is coming.

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