This is a long review cos I have a lot of feelings about this show. The headings are all words from the show. If you want the tl:dr, go and see Fun Home at the Court Theatre in Ōtautahi immediately or at least before Saturday 14 September when it closes.
Do you hear my heart saying hi?
I drove 356km to watch Fun Home at the Court Theatre, singing along to the soundtrack for a good portion of the journey. I had high hopes. It’s fair to say that as a reviewer I’m heavily biased towards the show. Fun Home is a musical by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book and lyrics), based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 autobiographical-ish graphic novel of the same name. If you’re not familiar with the work but kind of familiar with the name, this might be because of the Bechdel Test.
The Bechdel Test is when a work of fiction (1) has two female characters who (2) talk to each other (3) about something other than a man. Bechdel prefers to call it the Bechdel Wallace Test after Liz Wallace, who also appeared in the particular comic strip that Bechdel drew in 1985 for her Dykes to Watch Out For series, called ‘The Rule.’ Since Fun Home features Alison Bechdel’s lesbian coming out story alongside a deep dark dive into her family history, it more than passes The Test, and abides by The Rule, and it’s the female characters who really get to shine in this show. Particularly the Alisons, since there are three of them.
Flying into something so sublime
Alison aged 43, is played by Kelly Hocking who embodied so much the Alison of the comic strip, down to the exact flick of her hair. I had high hopes and the moment the lights came up on Alison at her drawing desk they turned into chills of ‘Oh, fuck yes.’ The attentiveness with which Kelly as Alison studies Small Alison and Medium Alison (over their diaries, argh, aching) as well as the objects she is using to bring memories to life absolutely anchor the show. Medium Alison, in her first year away at college, discovers she is a lesbian and Emma Katene plays her with such range. By which I mean I loved so much her physical awkwardness, particularly towards and with Joan (Lily Bourne) and also through her vast subtlety and phenomenal tenderness in ‘Changing My Major To Joan’, which is notably a not-subtle song about a first lesbian hook up. I totally believed Alison and Joan’s relationship and how good and pure and goddam lesbian it was in comparison with the fuckedness of Alison’s home life.
Also good and pure, tweenaged Small Alison (Carla Ladstaetter on the night I watched, though Eden Taylor is by all accounts awesome in this role too) who somehow manages to portray the light of a kid being a kid with the weight of growing up in an abusive household. About that. This show comes with multiple content advisories, some of which I’m going to write lightly about further below, and though there are young people in the cast, it’s not recommended for anyone under the age of fifteen. Sometimes things get a content warning because of The Gayness Involved, which I think covers some of ‘coarse language, mature themes and sexual references.’ Also though, there are ‘references to drug use’, more than fleeting ‘depictions and discussions of suicide’ and ‘the representation of a dead body and references to embalming procedures’.
The dead body is because ‘Fun Home’ is the family name for the family business which is a funeral parlour for which Small Alison and her brothers Christian (Erik Misnyovski/Ben Cumberpatch) and John (Franklin Domigan/Barnaby Domigan) make a commercial that has the audience clapping and laughing along to. The suicide—Alison’s father—Bruce Bechdel (played flawlessly with all his complex flaws by Michael Lee Porter). But I’m getting away from Small Alison and I want to stay there in a particular moment with her forever, where she stands at the front edge of the stage and sings ‘Ring of Keys’ which I cried the entire way through and am crying again even writing this because in a world where people are so damaging and damaged it’s such a beautiful thing to be able to recognise attractiveness and attraction away from the colonised and colonising paradigm we’ve all been subjected to, and plus it’s just a beltingly good song which Small Alison Carla belted so well.
I can draw a circle, you lived your life inside
It feels like director Kathleen Burns has created a whole world here, all the people and the elements working together. The relationships between the cast members were totally, playfully and/or creepily believable. The set and the staging were absolutely A+, they worked on different levels, with Alison always somewhere watching the action and this made me think of the scene where Alison’s father is trying to make her take a single perspective but she’d got the whole of her world laid out in a multi-boxed page. And that’s what this set felt like, we were inside the comic strip with them all.
Your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you’re wearing
Also, the choreography was so tight. And the costumes were incredible, with a shout out to Joan as the perfect college lesbian, and Isaac Pawson in all his supporting man roles, clothed and temporarily shirtless. And the band. And especially the lighting.
Days and days and days—
This show is so full of small moments that are so huge and two more of them are Alison’s mother Helen Bechdel (Juliet Reynolds-Midgely) and Medium Alison sitting on the sofa with suspiciously blackcurrant juicy wine while Helen sings and how they are sitting while her voice soars that hard I’m not sure. Similarly in the bigness in the stasis, when Alison swaps in with Medium Alison to live the memory of sitting with Bruce for the last time on a drive, the tension in the room, carried by these two characters in this supposedly mundane moment, watching telegraph wires pass by, was exquisite. Waiting for the lights. (OK, am crying again.)
Say something
In her intro to opening night, the Court Theatre’s Artistic Director Dr Alison Walls told the audience that Fun Home had the first explicitly lesbian protagonist on Broadway in 2015. After the show and the standing ovation, someone straight-presenting and white-patron-of-the-arts-ish said she thought it was a great show for ‘people like me.’ Which, as I’m sure is apparent from the frothing tone of this review, it is. Also, though, it’s a great show for people like everyone. To see the incredibleness of the sexy, supportive dynamic between Medium Alison and Joan, to see the love that Alison extends to her littler selves, to see Small Alison’s hope, to see how that contrasted with the family secrets and lies and abuse that so many of us are subjected to. To see how deftly this production handled that all. I love it, that in this political climate (by which I mean the dumpster fire of white supremacy that this government is flaming), the Court Theatre has chosen to put on this show and that I was there to see it.
As I held my girlfriend’s hand back along the more brightly-lit streets of central Ōtautahi, avoiding the heterosexual holding pens of Oxford Terrace, I was crying, singing and checking my diary and my bank account to see when if/how I could come back and see this production again before it closes on 14 September. It’s hard to live up to an iconic show and the Fun Home team in Ōtautahi did that and more. In summary, just, fuck yeah.
Fun Home is on at the Court Theatre in Ōtautahi until Saturday 14 September. You can find more information about the show, as well as a link for tickets on the Court Theatre website.
