BWW Previews: FUN HOME at Center Stage Theater

"Welcome to the Fun Home!"

The Tony Award-winning musical, Fun Home, will play at Center Stage, April 4-14. Based on the graphic novel by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, Fun Home recounts Bechdel's memories of growing up with her secretive father and later coming out as a lesbian. In the musical, Alison appears as three separate characters: "Alison" at 43 years old, "Little Alison" as a young girl and "Medium Alison" in college. Reviews of the early productions characterize the show as "ground-breaking" and "extraordinary." Fun Home won the Tony for Best Musical in 2015, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

I asked Samantha Eve, Out of the Box Theatre's Artistic Director and Production Director for Fun Home, why she selected this musical to bring to Santa Barbara. She pointed out that Fun Home uniquely blends loss, aching twinges of nostalgia with comedy. This witty blend of humor and tenderness stems from Alison Bechdel's original graphic novel, which was sub-titled a "family tragicomic." Even the title word "fun" in "Fun Home" refers to her father's work as a mortician and their connection to a funeral home.

Because Alison's memories of her past are colored by discoveries she has made in adulthood, I'm curious to see how this production will interpret these memories through scenery, costumes, and lighting. Alison's childhood home, an ornate Victorian obsessively restored by her father, promises to be a sort-of separate character in the play as a representation of her father's mask of blissful domesticity.

The score mixes a traditional Broadway sound with contemporary pop (the score and the book also won Tony Awards in 2015). When Artistic Director Eve saw Fun Home on Broadway, she sensed immediately that she needed to bring it to Santa Barbara because it has an unusually intimate style of story-telling for a Broadway show and would benefit from production in a smaller theatre like Center Stage. The compact space of Center Stage should enhance the immediacy of the story. It also limits the seating, so nab your tickets early.