By Joel Applegate
The source material for Salt Lake Acting Company’s new production of Tony Award-winning Best Musical, Fun Home, is a little unusual for Broadway. It comes from a graphic novel, but the music is as tuneful as any I’ve ever heard. I loved all the songs. The structure of the play – how this story is told – is phenomenally inventive. The elaborate first musical number sets the locale and the trajectory of this family’s journey. The three kids playing the Bechdel siblings sing a commercial for their family business – a funeral home (!) – that brought whoops from the audience.
I’ve seen plenty of shows at SLAC, but was immediately struck by the great detail and multiple levels of the set by Dennis Hassan. It is more elaborate than usual for SLAC. Behind the set, a five-piece ensemble led by Musical Director David Evanhoff, produces a tight sound that fills the room. Evanhoff conducts and plays drums, along with Wilson Hicken at the Piano 1, Ginger Bess on electronic keyboards, Davin Taylor with the bass, and Mark Maxson playing guitars.
This is a poignant and boisterous musical. Director Jason Bowcutt has paced this show beautifully, with each scene arching to a peak and leading logically to the next. His entire cast has great singing voices, and I was carried aloft with each impressive note. Composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist Lisa Kron have experimented with complexity, I think. They use music to tell the story the way memory would tell it. The big musical numbers are drawn out skillfully, and the interwoven narrative syncs with the punctuating music. They are upending styles, is what I’m saying, and the result is complex and clear.
It takes a family of HUGE talent to pull off Fun Home, and SLAC masterfully meets the challenge. From the perspective of the daughter, Alison, Fun Home features three actors at different stages of Alison’s life: a young girl (a role shared by Natalia Bingham, Presley Caywood, and Ava Hoekstra), a college student played by Hailee Olenberger, and an adult looking back with love, played with searching wonder by Shawnee Kennington. Kennington functions mostly as our narrator, but steps in at key moments, working seamlessly with the other two Alisons. Even when telling the story, Alison says, “I don’t trust memory.” But Kennington presides over it all with gravity tinged by a lingering innocence.
Playing the youngest Alison the evening I saw it, Bingham is wide open, singing with confidence and just being a kid without the cloying precociousness so many child actors fall into – and are apparently trained to be. (Word to parents!)
I can’t say enough about Olenberger, who plays Alison as a young woman. As if it’s not challenging enough to come to terms with her own sexuality, college-age Alison learns that her dad is also same-sex attracted. Olenberger and Benjamin Henderson, who plays Dad, have beautiful harmony together on a song I’ll call “Me & Him.” (Note to SLAC: Where’s the list of musical numbers in the program? I’d like to have seen that.) The coming out scene is a searing attempt to find an anchor. I felt both Dad and Alison wondering, “Where does my pain come from – am I flawed? What brought me here?” Despite her deep trepidation, Alison does find joy in the discovery of herself – something her father was unable to do.
Henderson as Dad has the voice of a bell, rising from the deep of his torso to caress his tenor. In addition to being a heck of a fine actor, he makes a wonderful Dad. I felt him really connecting with the kids on stage. He works for the second time (that I know of) with another fine actor and singer, Topher Rasmussen, who plays various parts in Dad’s secret life. Together these two actors were in another amazing production of difficult family life a few seasons ago, Next to Normal at UVU.
There’s so much about Fun Home that applies universally to families. The themes of fearfulness, relationship, sexual politics are all blended in this achingly human story. Oh Alison, you yearned so to have Dad be open, but he can’t because his vulnerability may actually be greater than yours. Some subjects are just too hard to broach, no matter how transparent. It is hard to watch a bridge between parent and child crumble.
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Mom, played by Ashley Wilkinson, stays in the background at first. But it is she who holds the family together, even while suffering the shocks of her husband’s infidelity. Her “Days and Days” song near the play’s climax is one of the most startling moments of the evening.
In Kennington’s and Henderson’s moving performances, tragedy is left like a pile of debris, a broken house. Henderson’s last song comes off like a trumpet. The audience sat there recovering from it – along with grown up Alison onstage. No applause. I breathed out an audible “wow”. The guy in the seat next to me whispered, “powerful.”
The Alison trio ends the show so aptly – a nod to how perfectly this play is constructed. Hope is revived when after loss, love is still left to be remembered, almost as if you were flying. Again, deferring to my seatmate: He likes “things that don’t bring closure, they leave it up to you to find meaning.” A very legitimate function of art, I think. And it’s why I go to the theater. Tickets are selling fast, I hear, so better get on it!
Salt Lake Acting Company presents Fun Home, Music by Jeanine Tesori, Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W 500 N, Salt Lake City, UT 84103
April 4 – May 13, 2018 Wednesday-Saturday 7:30 PM, Sunday 1:00 PM, 6:00 PM Running time is about 100 minutes, performed without an intermission.
Tickets: $24-$42
Contact: 801-363-7522, info@saltlakeactingcompany.org
Salt Lake Acting Company Facebook Page
Fun Home Facebook Event
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