What living composer is more versatile than Jeanine Tesori? Lyric Opera subscribers heard her beautiful score for the opera “Blue” this past autumn and now Porchlight Music Theatre is reviving “Fun Home,” one of the best song suites in any contemporary musical, not least because of how well Tesori adapted her colossal talents to a woman’s story rooted in memory both traumatic and elegiac.
“Fun Home” is based on a graphic novel memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel and probes many of life’s paradoxes through the recollection of the authorial lesbian character, Alison, who grew up in the 1970s in a Pennsylvania funeral home, the child of Bruce, a closeted, gay English teacher and funeral director who later killed himself.
The show is about many things: the strangeness, alienation and dark sense of humor that flows from growing up so close to death; the way the moment of our birth dictates our ability to be, or not be, ourselves; the central place our parents and our happy/sad childhoods occupy in our adult memories. Lisa Kron’s book of the musical is a magnificent achievement, not least for how well it universalizes Alison’s story by breaking her up into three personas, played by separate actors. “Fun Home” is hardly the first memory-based musical but it is uncommonly well-crafted in terms of its distinguishing between time and place, objective events and subjective memory.
I’ve seen “Fun Home,” which premiered on Broadway in 2015, several times before and have to confess the memory of certain productions is hard to shake. Sam Gold, the original director and a obsessive tinkerer, radically redid his Circle in the Square Theatre staging for the first national tour, resulting in a luminous touring production that starred Kate Shindle and eclipsed Gold’s first go-round. That was here in 2016. I saw the show again at Victory Gardens Theater in 2017 in a moving production directed by Gary Griffin. And in 2022, Jim Corti and Landree Fleming co-staged an unforgettably intimate and intense staging for the Paramount Theatre in Aurora that lives on in my memory and, for my money, was the best of all of them.
Stephen Schellhardt, who superbly played the father Bruce in that Aurora production, is the director of the Porchlight staging. There are many similarities between the two, including a lovely sense of authenticity and sincerity from a cast that features Alanna Chavez (as the narrator Alison) Patrick Byrnes (as Bruce) and Neala Baron (as Bruce’s wife, Helen). Also, Z Mowry plays Middle Alison and at the show I saw, the ever-busy, ever-better Meena Sood was Small Alison.
The Porchlight staging generally is well sung, if a tad over-pushed, especially toward the end. Despite her existing outside the main narrative thrust, Helen is in many ways the most interesting and complicated role in the show and the terrific Baron certainly makes that case.
The show struggles a bit in places to credibly evoke the relative innocence (or quiet oppression) of the 1970s and there are some moments of cluttered staging that just don’t work; as one example, a big gag involving kids hiding in a coffin kinda needs a casket to work. But while some of the requisite starkness and simplicity is sometimes missing, the heart of “Fun Home” is very much in the house.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Fun Home” (3 stars)
When: Through Feb. 2
Where: Porchlight Music Theatre at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Tickets: $20-$85 at porchlightmusictheatre.org
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