‘Fun Home’ story is more complicated than simple song and dance
When composer Jeanine Tesori met writer Lisa Kron to discuss transforming cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir “Fun Home” into a musical, Tesori told her, “I have no idea how this is going to work.”
Kron thought that meant “I was was saying no, but I was saying yes,” Tesori recalls in a telephone interview, adding that “‘I know that this sings.” Tesori just didn’t know how — at the time.
Despite “a long learning curve,” Tesori and Kron eventually figured it out. “Fun Home” followed its off-Broadway debut with a Broadway transfer that won five Tony Awards (out of 12 nominations), including best musical and best score.
And on Tuesday, “Fun Home” begins an eight-performance run in The Smith Center’s Reynolds Hall, with Kate Shindle (Miss America 1998) playing Bechdel as an all-grown-up Bechdel who’s trying to come to terms with her younger selves — and her troubled parents.
Especially her father Bruce, who’s constantly having to pretend he’s not who he is, says Shindle (who’s currently president of the stage actors’ union Actors Equity) in a separate telephone interview.
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“There’s a different resonance in terms of what people go through,” she adds. “Alison and her father deal with issues in different ways.”
Dealing with issues at all can be a challenge in a musical, because there’s “a perception that musicals are simply entertainment — the songs are important, the dances are important and the scenes are just mechanisms to connect” them, Shindle notes.
Robert Petkoff, who plays Bechdel’s father on the yearlong “Fun Home” tour, likens traditional song-and-dance musicals to “wonderful desserts — a light little something you see” and don’t think much about afterward.
By contrast, “something like ‘Fun Home’ is a fantastic five-star meal,” Petkoff says in a telephone interview from a previous tour stop. “Some of the flavors and textures can be challenging to the palate, but it changes the way you think about musicals.”
That sort of challenge has always appealed to Tesori, the composer notes, citing such previous works as “Caroline, or Change” — a collaboration with award-winning “Angels in America” playwright Tony Kushner that centers on a black maid during the 1960s.
“I’m drawn to the less visible stories,” Tesori acknowledges. (Her Broadway credits also include less adventurous crowd-pleasers, from “Shrek the Musical” to “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”)
Tesori’s also drawn to working with playwrights, like Kron, who have never tackled a musical before.
“It’s really fun — you have the energy and hunger of a new form,” Tesori reflects. And while “I could hear the musicality in her work,” Kron had to learn song form before “Fun Home” could start taking shape, the composer adds.
“All of a sudden, you start making a piece of work,” she adds. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Along with “a certain humility,” however, there’s “a super arrogance (that) ‘I can do this.’ ”
One of the biggest challenges in bringing “Fun Home” to the stage, she notes, involved the source material, a graphic novel subtitled “A Family Tragicomic.”
The project “operates on such an intense level,” Tesori observes. And unlike many of the musicals she’s written, which have a chronological narrative structure, in “this one, we’re looking backwards in order to move forward.”
For Shindle, “Fun Home” presents “an important story, and an important story to tell right now,” with Bechdel acknowledging, and embracing, her sexuality as she comes of age.
As a young girl (played by Alessandra Baldacchino), she’s struck by a delivery woman’s “swagger and … bearing and the just-right clothes you’re wearing — your short hair and your dungarees and your lace-up boots … and your ring of keys.” And in college (played by Abby Corrigan), Alison falls for a classmate and declares that “I’m changing my major to Joan.”
Despite the specificity of Bechdel’s feelings, Shindle “felt the words on the page were universal,” noting that she could “hear the voice of the character in my head” the first time she read the “Fun Home” script.
As Petkoff observes, “there’s not a single person in the audience who can’t identify with first falling in love,” he says. “It’s so universal. That’s ultimately what has made ‘Fun Home’ so successful. Everyone who has family sees something in this story.”
And “in a 100-minute show, every minute is important,” says Shindle — who’s onstage for the entire time.
“It’s fascinating for people who love musical theater — and also for people who aren’t sure they like musical theater,” she adds. “The show is giving them credit for being intelligent and listening. On top of the entertainment value, that’s the gold standard.”
Read more from Carol Cling at reviewjournalcom. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.
Preview
What: "Fun Home"
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; also 7:30 p.m. Jan. 6, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 7-8
Where: Reynolds Hall, The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, 361 Symphony Park Ave.
Tickets: $29-$127 (702-749-2000, www.thesmithcenter.com)