Come to the ‘Fun Home’

Last season’s best off-Broadway musical is now this season’s best Broadway musical. “Fun Home” is the best Broadway musical in years. Don’t let the subject matter fool you. You might have heard that the Jeanine Tesori-Lisa Kron musical, adapted from the autobiographical “graphic novel” by Alison Bechdel, is about a lesbian cartoonist and her gay father who kills himself. That might not sound like a cheery way to spend a couple of hours, but don’t be misled. Fun Home is an emotional roller-coaster ride, a grippingly heartwarming story mixed with some of the most smart and joyful musical numbers presently on Broadway. Alison (Beth Malone) is, indeed, a 43-year-old lesbian cartoonist. We also see her as the pre-teen Small Alison (Sydney Lucas) and the college-freshman Middle Alison (Emily Skeggs). The nature of the narrative that Kron and Tesori have devised–and the beauty of the piece–is that we can see them all at the same time, in the same space, sometimes delivering the same sentence. Small Alison grows up trying to communicate with her decidedly difficult father Bruce (Michael Cerveris); Middle Alison leaves home for college, where (a) she comes out, (b) learns her father is gay, and (c) watches as he commits suicide months later. The adult Alison, meanwhile, struggles to make sense of it all. While the three Alisons are central, Cerveris (of Assassins and Titanic) is the key to the proceedings. As the repressed, unknowable father, he gives an excellent performance so uncharacteristic that some viewers are likely not to even recognize him under the hairpiece.