Review: The Huntington's FUN HOME Is That and More

A funeral home may seem an unlikely setting for a Broadway musical, but it turns out to be an ideal backdrop for the deeply moving “Fun Home.”

Boston audiences likely already know the show well, from its first-rate 2017 national tour stop at Citizens Opera House and the splendid 2019 SpeakEasy Stage Company production to the 2020 mounting at Norwell’s Company Theatre – featuring Aimee Doherty (The Huntington’s “The Hills of California”) as the adult Allison – interrupted by Covid and eventually presented in the fall of 2021. Now through December 14, The Huntington is bringing “Fun Home” back to Boston in a humorous, heartbreaking, and beautifully sung new production at the Huntington Theatre.

Based on self-described “lesbian cartoonist” Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic-style memoir, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” the one-act, 140-minute show opened off-Broadway at The Public Theater and was nominated for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama before premiering on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre in March 2015. The first Broadway musical with a lesbian lead character, “Fun Home” features a Tony Award-winning score by composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist Lisa Kron, who also won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical, a first for an all-female team.

Equal parts memory play and musical, “Fun Home” presents Bechdel at three different stages of her life – in her spirited childhood, at her college-age coming out, and as a 40-something wrestling with memories of her complex family and reflecting on her own personal journey. 

Director Logan Ellis – who first worked with Huntington artistic director Loretta Greco at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco – stages this “Fun Home” in some new and different ways, not all of which work and some that muddy the story. These including placing the drawing desk used by the sensitive yet stoic middle-aged Alison (Sarah Bockel) at center stage, and having her be a very up-close observer of the actions of her family earlier in her life. And the mother character, Helen, comes and goes in a series of awkward entrances and exits..

 This intimate, profoundly personal tale of the five-member Bechdel family and a few of the people who cross paths with them is being told by Alison, of course, but having the character moving among the other characters makes it sometimes seem she is haunting them rather than the other way around.

Heading the family is Alison’s conflicted father, Bruce (Nick Duckart), a funeral director, high-school English teacher, and restorer of historic residences. He is a tightly wound man, determined to satisfy his own secret urges, with little time for his wife and family. The truth about Bruce and the toll his secrets and self-obsession took on his family unfold in flashbacks recalled by middle-aged Alison in the scene-setting early numbers, “It All Comes Back” and “Sometimes My Father Appeared to Enjoy Having Children,” and more.

While Bruce endeavors to maintain tight control, within him clearly roils a wide range of emotions, including his sometimes hard-to-hide attraction to younger men. Alison is acknowledging her own sexuality just as she begins to see that her father is also gay and is tormented in ways that ultimately subsume him.

That’s heavy stuff for sure, but Tesori and Kron also know when to lighten the mood, with songs like “Changing My Major,” which has Medium Alison (Maya Jacobson) falling hard for Joan (Sushma Saha), a college friend. The joyous Jacobson will have audiences falling for her, too, when she proudly exclaims, “I’ll take out a majorly huge high-interest loan, because I’m changing my major to Joan.”

A similar, earlier moment of discovery involves Small Alison (Lyla Randall). Out at a diner with her father, the adolescent girl notices a “butch” delivery woman. The talented-beyond-her-years Randall delivers a sweet and soaring “Ring of Keys,” gloriously demonstrating how many young gays and lesbians feel when they realize they are not alone.

Alison’s brothers, Christian (Odin Vega) and John (Caleb Levin), join her on “Come to the Fun Home,” a terrific homemade TV commercial enlivened by Taavon Gamble’s high-spirited choreography, also seen on “Raincoat of Love,” a fantasy in which he has the cast channel The Fifth Dimension, the Brady Bunch, and all things groovy, with added credit going to Costume Designer Celeste Jennings for the bedazzled bell-bottom jumpsuits.

Rounding out the first-rate cast are Jennifer Ellis as Helen, Alison’s often sidelined mother who shares what her life is really like in the time- and place-establishing “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” and the poignant – and, by Ellis, gorgeously rendered – “Days and Days.” Wyatt Anton also displays considerable versatility as a host of supporting characters including Roy, Pete, Mark, and Bobby Jeremy.

A fine six-piece band, conducted by Jessie Rosso, helps set every mood, performing above the stage inside a handsome cut-out panel designed by Tanya Orellana, whose funeral parlor setting – while well served by Philip Rosenberg’s lighting design – reads more sparse than usual and, as such, undercuts the impactful realism found in earlier productions.

The power of “Fun Home” is that it offers not only a winningly original score but also a thought-provoking portrait of complicated family relationships that will leave you pondering your own, and maybe rethinking a memory or two. 

With all that to revel in, it might seem natural to sit back and just take this show in as a very well done musical. With something to touch everyone, however, this beautifully bittersweet story deserves more. So if you saw “Fun Home” in New York or here on national tour and in other local productions, see it again now. Like life itself, this production isn’t perfect, but it’s got a lot to offer.