Review: FUN HOME at The Gladstone Theatre

Let's cut to the chase: TotoToo Theatre’s presentation of Fun Home, based on the graphic memoir of cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, is a must-see musical.

I didn’t know much about the show before seeing it, aside from the title and the fact that it was nominated for a dozen Tony Awards, ultimately winning Best Musical. Listening to snippets of the cast recording beforehand, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it, but it seemed like the type of score that requires context to fully appreciate, so I went in with an open mind.

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s coming of age story, labelled as a tragicomedy. Bechdel, who came out as a lesbian during university, created the comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 and was among the first works in popular culture to feature lesbian characters. In fact, Bechdel’s comic strip introduced what is now known as the Bechdel Test, used to measure the representation of women in fiction. To pass, the work must (1) have at least two women in it who (2) talk to each other about something (3) other than a man.

In Fun Home, Bechdel is portrayed by three actresses for each of her life stages reflected in the musical, Adult Alison (Steph Goodwin), Medium Alison (Kaylee Ross), and Small Alison (Emilia Castro and Frances Winchester, alternating) early life was not an easy one.

Her father, Bruce (Jason Swan) keeps busy by renovating the historic Victorian house the family lived in, teaching at a local school, and running the family business, a funeral home that the kids slyly dubbed the “Fun Home”. Her mother, Helen (Nicole Tishler) is an actress, frequently absent or aloof, and is burdened with family secrets. Alison is a tomboy and she and her siblings, John (Luna Oancea) and Christian (Jean-Luc Arun Mullin) are often left to their own devices, which involves sneaking around the funeral home and getting into mischief. Alison loves to sketch, dreaming of being a cartoonist, but her aspirations are dismissed by her father, who prefers classical literature. The musical often paints scenes as though they were cartoon panels, with Adult Alison providing a caption for each event. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, where homosexuality is hidden rather than accepted, Alison only begins to discover her own sexual identity when she meets Joan (Naomi Miller) at university.

The set design, by Gillian Hosick, is relatively simple, with the interior of the Victorian house on Maple Avenue suggested through cartoon-style cutouts of its architectural and decorative details, and it works extremely well.

Don Douglas’s lighting design is especially effective in a pivotal, jarring scene late in the show, echoing a similar moment in Vienna’s Rock Me Amadeus and underscoring the creative talent behind TotoToo Theatre’s Fun Home.

The music and lyrics, by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, and directed here by Mark Allen, is inextricably tied to the show; the lyrics express the inner turmoil of the characters, and the impassioned performances of the cast make them feel even more poignant. Notably, Tishler’s rendition of “Days and Days” and Goodwin’s “Telephone Wire” are heartbreakingly beautiful, while Ross’s “Changing My Major” offers a hilarious, joyful portrait of fully embracing one’s own identity. The use of repeated lyrics with different significations throughout the musical makes the score come together.

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