“Fun Home” is breathtaking and heartbreaking

“Airplane, I wanna play airplane!” calls out a little girl as she steps on stage. The first lines of “Fun Home” seem light and offhand, but little Alison’s desperation and frustration shine through as she calls out to her father, begging him to pay attention to her.

“Fun Home,” a musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel-memoir by the same name, is brilliant and hard hitting. This poignant and unsentimental look at Bechdel’s childhood has as much as verisimilitude as Bechdel’s tone has style. Reporters from the Raider Times attended the fantastic showing of “Fun Home” at the Boston Opera House on Oct. 18, 2017.

“Fun Home” centers on Alison’s childhood and young adult life. Alison’s life and coming out are complicated by her long-repressed sexuality, suppressed by, surprisingly, her father, whose own sexuality would prove to be his longest struggle. Alison’s family is plagued by fighting and miscommunication, each of the members of the family formed and tainted by the the struggles of Alison and Bruce’s respective processes of self-discovery.

The songs of “Fun Home” are absolutely breathtaking. It’s not every day that one sees a book transformed into a musical without losing any integrity of the plot, but “Fun Home” does this so effectively that the words of every song feel so natural to the character who speaks them. Not a word of any song is misplaced or awkward, each line flows with perfect diction, each stanza so fitting to the context of the scene and the character which they concern. This is perhaps best exemplified by “Telephone Wire,” where Alison’s thoughts are sung aloud in a way that is genuine yet succinct.

“Fun Home” is evocative and ardently focused on the truth of Alison’s family, eliciting unexpected bursts of emotion throughout. It is elusive in its subtle depiction of Alison’s loneliness, her misunderstanding of herself, her father’s tortured life, and her mother’s quiet desperation. The last scene left many audience members tearful and prompted a thunderous standing ovation when the lights were extinguished.

Bruce Bechdel, with his life of twisted morals and bitterness, was played perfectly by Robert Petkoff. He managed to capture from the memoir Bruce’s indescribable balance of madness and order, misery and violent joy.

Bruce is not, as one might suspect, the villain; “Fun Home” looks upon him with kindness and forgiveness. Bruce’s indiscretions, his legal issues, even his domestic abuse, all certainly unforgivable, are acknowledged but looked upon with compassion. His pain is perhaps the most affecting because he succumbed to pressure and to his own selfish wants, sacrificing the happiness of his family.

Still, despite all his faults, the audience is reminded constantly that there are parts of him that are good. Petkoff showed all of Bruce’s many sides, and his depiction of Bruce’s suicide is so effective that it shocked the audience into silence.

Susan Moniz was also spectacular as Helen Bechdel, Alison’s mother. Helen’s deep-seated problems are never stated beyond a single song, but that song is filled with passion, and her amazing acting throughout the play makes it clear that she suffered alongside Bruce, and was hardly the unconscious housewife.

However, the most impressive performance of the night was that of Abby Corrigan, who plays college-age Alison. Corrigan captures a character whose complexity is hard to access. She skillfully portrays Alison’s teenage anxiety and awkwardness, mixed with a shy and amiable charm.

Overall, “Fun Home” is hilarious and breaks your heart. It gently nudges the audience into Alison’s world in all of its charm and subtle unhappiness, and encourages it to understand the Bechdel family, whose hidden discomfort was deliciously painful, and so uncomfortably, violently, beautifully, human.

(“Fun Home” is playing at Boston Opera House from Oct. 17 to Oct. 29, 2017. For more information or tickets, go to https://boston.broadway.com/shows/fun-home-baa/.)

–Oct. 19, 2017–