‘Fun Home’ at The Young Vic, London – review
The award-winning stage adaptation of Alison Bechdel's graphic-novel memoir arrives in the UK.
By Will Stroude
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Based on , Fun Home arrives in London three years after the Broadway production netted five Tony awards including the coveted Best Musical prize.
The show was a hit, turning a profit against low running costs, and a surprising hit at that since it’s about a lesbian cartoonist’s journey towards sexual self-discovery and her complex relationship with her also-gay father, with secrets and lies and one character’s death all part of the puzzle.
That’s hardly the stuff of jazz-hands razzle dazzle, but then Fun Home is what you’d call a ‘dramatical’ rather than a musical, using songs as conversations and expressions of thoughts and feelings rather than designing them to send us out of the theatre humming. As composer Jeanine Tesori says “It behaves like a play and emotes like a musical”.
And, stripped back to its original Off-Broadway roots in the Young Vic’s relatively intimate main house,, it packs quite an emotional wallop – not, interestingly enough, in its coming-out story (since the Alison character doesn’t have too hard a time of it) but more because of the daughter-father dynamic that speaks to anyone who has yearned for parental approval.
It wouldn’t work without the right cast and this production is gifted not just with three terrific Alisons – Kaisa Hammarlund, Eleanor Kane and, on press night, Brooke Haynes (who is rotating the role with two others) respectively as present day, college kid and young girl versions – but also Zubin Varla as her troubled father and Jenna Russell as the mother who’s been turning a blind eye to his affairs with men.
The staging is simple and clever, the music beautifully played, and if one of the two big numbers (namely a disco dream sequence) is so bad it should have been cut the other one, where a trio of kids come up with a commercial for a funeral home, is wonderfully funny.
Likewise the show, which as written by Lisa Kron. is as funny as it is thought-provoking and the fact it puts a queer woman front and centre makes it groundbreaking too.
Rating: 4/5
Fun Home is at The Young Vic until 1 September. For more great deals on tickets and shows click here.
Words by Simon Button