Austin Withdrawal Is Rough, Y'all, So I Made 'Burritos'by Randi / June 9, 2015
My Playbill signed by Alison Bechdel herself, who was in my audience. Or, I was in her audience.
“Fun Home” is the kind of musical theatre that makes you grateful for the art form. Rarely are we treated to any art or entertainment that doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in our society or at least dumb itself down to appeal to the ignint masses. “Fun Home”, in contrast, treats its audience like intelligent, thinking people, and we are gifted the most heart-aching, mature, and deep show in years.
People think “Broadway Musical” should mean something diverting, with fun and dancing and repetitive, catchy songs about trivial happy things. And some shows are and should be like that. But modern shows need to challenge the genre and the audience in new ways to keep it growing and improving. New scores should develop emotions in ways words can’t; that’s kind of the point of having music in a play or like in the world, to express what words can’t. “Next to Normal” did all this and was revolutionary and boundary-pushing, but that was 6 or so years ago; nothing since has been up to the challenge.
Until now. “Fun Home” picks up that gauntlet thrown by “Next to Normal” and runs farther than ever. I think “Fun Home” will catch on and become more popular, and will continue to break barriers in this kind of storytelling. It seems like a really unlikely musical, given its subject matter, but it geniusly uses music to deepen its storytelling rather than embellish. The result is far more important and remarkable than anyone would have predicted.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
“Fun Home” is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Alison Bechdel. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies: when two female characters are in a scene together and talk about something other than a man, it passes. (Movies rarely pass this test.) So Bechdel is professionally a very noteworthy modern voice. Her personal story, on the other hand, is the basis for the novel and the show; Tony winner Lisa Kron wrote the show’s book based tightly on its source material. It chronicles Alison’s upbringing in a small country town of Pennsylvania, from when she’s a little kid discovering herself and her sexuality; to when she’s a college student accepting who she is while learning more about her disciplined and particular father; to the modern-day adult looking back on her relationship with her father. Bruce Bechdel, a very rigid and exacting man, hid his own homosexuality his entire life. The story is told from grown-up Alison’s perspective as she looks back on her childhood and tries to come to grips with her father’s suicide (not a spoiler, real person, point of show). So, yeah, not the most expected story for a Broadway musical, but it works so well that you’ll be questioning your assumptions about everything, not just musical theatre.
Grown-up Alison (played by a superb Beth Malone (Tony nominee)) takes us on a tour through her memories of her younger years, as she tries to accurately recall the memories to draw, as her comics were what helped her deal with her complicated relationship with her father. As she revisits her childhood museum-like home, the funeral home her family ran (hence the title, what they referred to it as, the ‘fun home’), and different moments with her family, we watch with her as she witnesses her childhood memories being lived by the younger versions of herself (Sydney Lucas as Young Alison, an absolute legend in the making, and Emily Skeggs as Middle Alison (both Tony nominees)). She laughs along with us as she sees her little self and her little brothers stage a hilarious musical commercial for the fun home. Watching little kids pop out of caskets and dance on them is shocking and hilarious and the happiest time of the heavy show. She smiles along with us at the most poignant moments in her life, like when her younger self, always yearning for contact with her father, goes ‘flying’, balancing on Bruce’s feet as he lies down with his legs up, a happy memory of the best of their relationship that remains untarnished. Just thinking about that moment makes me cry.
Young Alison’s relationship with her father is the crux of this story, and it’s a wonder. You clearly see that they have a bond but one that is easily strained, especially when she pushes his rigid lines and rules. She doesn’t want to wear barrettes or dresses, but he can’t allow the blurring of gender boundaries, an obvious result of his hidden side and the shame he feels at not being what he feels he’s supposed to be. Their beautiful house is decorated perfectly with antiques and museum-worthy furniture that he dictates be positioned exactly as he says. He controls fastidiously anything he can because he can’t control himself or his urges as he believes he should. And you see all this so well in the subtle and poignant portrayal of Bruce by Michael Cerveris, the great. His Tony win was completely deserved; his portrayal is beautiful and crushing and I was rooting for him even though he’s a past winner (I am usually socialist in my awards decisions but not for him). His nuanced Bruce makes you feel terrible for his tragic persona even when his inability to control his urges leads him to make terrible decisions, like leaving his little kids alone in a NYC apartment so he can go cruising, or having flings with his underage high school students. It’s this loving but lacking relationship with his young daughter that makes it so hard to watch as it strains further, as she grows and becomes more self aware as a college student. Middle Alison accepts and embraces her personality and her sexuality as a young lesbian, and with this evolution her relationship with her father weakens, because he can never accept himself as his daughter has learned to do. Her coming out is barely acknowledged by her family, not out of disrespect or denial but because it would shatter the very fragile world her parents strived to keep balanced. And yes, her mother (Judy Kuhn) was aware and struggled her whole life to keep quiet and pretend that everything was fine.
Bruce and Alison’s final encounter is so perfectly and tragically portrayed as a silent car ride, with Alison, the grown-up who never got to spend time with her father, taking over the memory from Middle Alison. Beth Malone tearfully sings to her former self to say something to her father before the chance is gone, yelling to hurry up before the ride is over, as she knows in hindsight that it soon will be.
This story would work as a play, sure, but the music makes it so much more felt and heart-breaking. One of the best songs, “Ring of Keys”, is a startled realization that little Alison can dress however she wants, when she sees “an old-school butch”, as her older self remembers and explains (and as CBS/the FCC f-ing had them change on their Tony Awards performance because I guess some Americans aren’t okay with the word butch???!!!). Sydney’s performance of this song is so thoughtful and natural and incredible that it’s hard to believe she’s a child. No child actor has ever been this talented in history. It’s why she was considered the front-runner for the Tony Awards. Her fiercest competition was thought to be not from winner Ruthie Ann Miles (for “The King & I”) but from the actress who plays her mother, the great Judy Kuhn. Quiet, clearly long-suffering, she surprises us when she tells her college aged daughter about her father’s secret and that she’s known for, well, for “Days & Days & Days”, as her astounding, stunning big song goes. She freaking kills it, sharing how hard it has been to silently let her husband dictate and destroy their lives and how she sat by and watched for so long as nothing changed. In just one song, Kuhn defines and redefines her entire character’s story and adds new layers of wrenching emotion to the show as a whole. It must be such a pleasure to play a complex character for once (Kuhn originated the thankless role of Cosette in the original Broadway production of “Les Miserables”).
“Fun Home” is a flawless show that in only 100 minutes presents such depth and range of emotion and experience and it is all completely spell-binding. That it won the Tony Award shows that audiences and musical theatre as a genre are both ready to be treated with respect and given art that is worthy of being called art. (Of course, last night’s premature closure of “The Visit” argues in the opposite direction but we can’t win every battle.) I hope everyone sees it, learns from it, and remembers it as a benchmark for future shows. This is the direction Broadway needs to move in, and it’s a relief that people seem to accept that.
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The Wedding Singer & London Theatre’s Jewish Problem
London theatre has a Jewish problem. Whether the fault of creative teams, prejudice in the community and thus audiences, or a mix of both (it’s both), there’s an obvious ‘othering’ happening that feels offensive and demoralizing. Suffice it to say, I’m tired. Ain’t you tired Miss Hilly? I recently saw The Wedding Singer – a show I loved when I saw it on Broadway – and had to leave at the interval. I NEVER do that. (Okay, once.) (I mean one other time; this isn’t a Simpsons thing.) I felt ridiculed and ridiculous, with everyone around me in on a joke that is not funny. And I realized that this problem that I’ve been noticing in tiny bits and pieces is larger than I wanted to believe.
As we saw with last season’s Falsettos debacle, many productions fail to make a concerted effort to ensure that Jewish voices are involved with Jewish content. Not to start playing an unwinnable battle of the minorities, but you would never see a production of e.g. The Normal Heart without gay men involved, or The Inheritance. Or Falsettos! And this isn’t only about the acting talent, because yes, it’s the job of actors to play other identities, like Scarlett Johansson and her tree. It’s about having representation in the creative process, whether onstage or off, someone in the room to speak up, to ensure that representation onstage isn’t problematic or insulting. I didn’t support last season’s Falsettos by seeing it, but according to some people who did go, it was indeed insulting.
If it was anything like the Bar Mitzvah scene of The Wedding Singer, I’m glad I didn’t go. In this show, based on the great Adam Sandler movie, the lead needs a break from singing at weddings, and the scene changes to a Bar Mitzvah. It’s semi-funny in the movie because of Sandler and the content of the scene. But here, presenting the scene of a Bar Mitzvah was the joke in itself. As soon as men dressed in traditional Hasidic black suits and vests and hats come out, the audience roars. It doesn’t matter whether it’s funny that Robbie now has to change his act or do things he’s not used to doing – the joke was clearly Judaism. You could barely hear the lines or music because the audience was laughing at the pure visuals of Jewish men in their suits and payot (yes, they wore fake payot). That was the punch line. I felt my entire body burning with anger, as well as shame. And it got worse: the feature of this new act was Robbie’s queer keyboardist (I could write a whole nother piece on how offensively homophobic the direction around this character and everything else slightly queer was and how it was used for weird cheap laughs (and this was hundo p a right-wing crowd laughing at not with)) singing Hebrew prayers to the tune of an ’80s song.
I don’t remember whether this is done in the movie or the original production, but even if it was, it does not go over well here. Comedy has different effects on different crowds and communities, and you can tell when it’s good natured. Here, it is pure mockery of the sound of the Hebrew language and prayers, amid the sheer look of Jewish people as a punch line. In the movie, Sandler is a known Jewish performer whose comedy has the ability to poke good-natured fun at his culture. Here, it wasn’t good-natured, it was ridicule, and the laughter around me was based in contempt, which is why I left. (The production isn’t very good so I wasn’t heartbroken to leave – the pacing is about twice as slow as it should be, like the directorial metronome is broken, which makes all the actually good parts of the show fail.) Also, just because something plays appropriately in New York does not mean it will here. You have to be cognizant of the differences in the communities. In a Broadway theatre, you’re surrounded by Jews, and Jewishness is part of New York culture, especially in the theatre. In the UK, Jews are still considered rare, outsiders, and blamed for all sorts of things (like Labour losing). And there aren’t that many. In London, I was for sure the only Jewish person in the audience at my performance of Wedding Singer, and I wasn’t even surprised. Productions have to be aware of how something will play in different places and think about whether it works or not.
Falsettos wasn’t the start to the problem, and clearly not the end. I’ve noticed this in many shows over the past few years, and I’m new. The last production of Caroline, or Change was my first shocking moment. There’s a line in the show where Caroline says to her young Jewish charge that his people burn in hell. On Broadway, this line was met with a kind of hushed “oh shit” reaction, like wow that was dark, and cruel. In London, it was met with a hearty chuckle. Not a nervous laugh, a real laugh. If that doesn’t show how differently the same thing can play in the two cities and how important it is to make sure you have someone in the room (Caroline had no Jews) to account for potential offensive representation, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Recent (and great) productions like Rags at the Park Theatre and Leopoldstadt (review next week) at Wyndham’s are promising in their inclusivity and representation, although the latter still had a few very strange moments of laughter when I saw it. I am still continually surprised at what London audiences will laugh at. And yesI have a different sense of humor as an American, but sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes the laughter is quite troubling (like in Caroline and parts of Appropriate). We know that anti-Semitism is just as strong as ever in this country (and around the world), and that’s something to be aware of when you are creating art that involved Jews or Jewishness. My horror at The Wedding Singer may seem misplaced or overblown to you, but that show’s missteps are symptoms of a much larger problem in British theatre and the country itself.
Premiere of A Mother’s Song, Finn Anderson’s Latest Folksy Wonder
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is the premiere of A Mother’s Song: A New Folk Musical, which just played the Macrobert Arts Centre at University of Stirling last week.
I am realizing that I’m as close to a groupie as one can be for a relatively new Scottish musical theatre composer. Cool! After falling truly madly deeply in love with Finn Anderson’s Islander a few years ago, we had to go to Stirling to see the premiere of this New Folk Musical, A Mother’s Song. A Mother’s Song has promise and could be great. It’s a fully fleshed out full-length musical with some real moments of gloriousness that gave me chills. Anderson has collaborated with director Tania Azevedo to create this show about motherhood throughout many, many generations of one family line, from long-ago Scotland to present day Brooklyn via West Virginia (for once the American accents were Southern for a reason!). They tell the generation-weaving story with music that blends traditional folk songs with modern takes on them, plus some plain old modern songs.
Anderson has his own sound, that folksy sea-shanty-loving if-you-close-your-eyes-you-can-see-the-Highland-coos-in-the-foggy-fields sound with its tight, sometimes spellbinding multi-part harmonies. This score had several moments where I was like ‘yes! this is it! the Finn sound!’, and if he finds and adds some more of that, this would be a score you could compare more to Islander. That show’s amazing use of overlapping percussion to aid in storytelling is largely missing here, and would really serve this show well (also it’s just an awesome element to his sound that I missed). The great moments happen mainly in the first act, especially when the use of traditional Scottish folk songs blend seamlessly with his new songs. When our oldest ancestor Cait (Kirsty Findlay, also in Islander) sings the traditional The Four Marys and it goes right into An Unwelcome Visitor (the visitor in question being a bebe, damn), WHEW but that was pure fire! It helps that Findlay is one of the strongest performers I’ve seen in years, so keyed into nuance and able to harness the power of her voice in precise little acrobatics that serve as a masterclass in how to act through singing (none of that ‘I’m going to speak a few words for emphasis even though that’s never really effective’ stuff from her). She was so incredible in Islander and here she proves again she’s in a class of her own.
Cait’s storyline, of a minister’s wife who is unwillingly pregnant, weaves with her descendant Jean’s storyline, of a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant, is not really fussed about it!, and runs away to have the bebe in the new world. Blythe Jandoo’s Jean is as likeable as her real name is baller, with maybe the most enjoyable story of the bunch since at least (compared to Cait’s) you know you aren’t going to have to think about the precursor to wire hangers. These two stories (and these two performers) rise above the more modern ones and are moving, powerful, compelling.
As for the modern story, we have Bethany Tennick (the performer and one of the writers of Land, from last year’s Fringe, and one of the two Islanders) as Sarah, a PhD candidate but also a professor (once again I am begging British playwrights to let me just have a once-over on an scripts that take place in America just to find inconsistencies like this) living in Brooklyn in an apartment she just bought with her newly qualified lawyer girlfriend (I repeat what I just parenthesized) (in the USA no one is described as newly qualified or fully qualified like in the UK, you’ve either passed the Bar or not yet) (also no way this new lawyer is a human rights lawyer in a firm, no). She is holding onto a box from her deceased Aunt Betty from West Virginia, full of cassette tapes of Betty’s research into the folk songs that shape their history. Which is a nice framing device, but in practice Betty’s scenes work kind of like a lecture and weren’t as enjoyable as the historical scenes. I did find the info she shares interesting, but I like school (we were in a university after all, I’ll give you that).
One thing I truly loved though was the use of Scots language! LOVES IT. I went home and immediately read some Rabbie Burns. Okay no I didn’t but I meant to. It was so well done, and yes there were two screens with captions (very helpful and only blocked my view a handful of times!) but I think it was clear what was being said without relying on reading. Kirsty in particular did such a good job expressing the musicality of the language I was like fully ready to add another language to my Duolingo to forget about in a week.
So as the stories weave and build, the show is intriguing and can be moving, but there are a few spots that need work. Specifically, the cut from one of the greatest songs, Cait singing about the rage inside of her, that goes right to the modern song about the modern couple’s karaoke nights?? It was a harsh juxtaposition, and it felt completely incongruous, able to be lifted right out of the show (and maybe should be). It also showed how much more compelling the historical stories are than the modern one.
Generally, I think the second act needs work. The show goes from 3-4 stories woven fairly nicely together in the first act, to being almost just one straightforward regular one-plot play in the second. Mainly, it’s a bit tedious, weaker than the first because it’s entirely about the modern storyline, and how their relationship ends because the aunt’s tapes made Sarah realize she wants kids? It’s all a little ‘wait what? listening to some tapes made you change your mind about a huge life decision?’ (It’s also peculiar that it’s been two years since aunt’s death. Maybe if it just happened (maybe even suddenly) then Bethany’s huge change of heart would be in part explained due to grief and guilt.)) But even if that was all substantiated, it’s just that no one cares as much about the modern storyline or this relationship as we do about the other two storylines. So having so little from the other two and instead having the whole act about this decoupling that we kind of are like ‘okay, whatever, you do you’ about, is a let down. And we lost the Finn sound. Needs more of those supertight multipart harmonies!
Also, the hardships compound so much that it feels a little like disaster porn, like everything that can go wrong or can be terrible will. At one point, the mood veers in a way that lets you see that a beloved character is deffo gonna die, and I said to myself, no, that’s too predictable, too overdone, too dire. And then of course she died like a second after I thought that. I understand the desire to show hardship – no one wants to see a story that pretends women had autonomy or all happy endings – but we’re getting a lotttt of sadness in this show. A spree of melancholy starts to feel a bit banal. You need to break up the tragedy with at least a drop of lightness.
However, I’m just sharing all these negative things because this show was overall really good and could be EXCELLENT with some of these changes, and obvs I want it to be EXCELLENT. You know I don’t go hoarse for a player with no potential! There’s a lot of brilliance already in it and sooo much more waiting to be revealed with just a little bit of digging.
Other thoughts: The old-timey costumes were well done. They seemed so elaborate and on point for such a short run. However, the modern clothes were wee headscratchers, namely the denim jumpsuit. I get how on paper that sounds right for a PhD candidate in Brooklyn but just take my word that Bethany deserves a cooler costume!
Lights: I remain convinced that lighting designers who enjoy adding in series of bright flashes of lights for ‘art’s sake’ have never sat in a seat to see how it actually plays. Luckily these artistic flashes were mainly at the start and finish, so it wasn’t too hard to cover my eyes, but it still was a rough go. I hope that this trend stops! Being temporarily blinded did not make me appreciate the dramaz any better!
INFORMATION
The show had a short run as its premiere last week, but given the people involved I’m sure we’ll be seeing future runs (hence why I’m writing all this).
Macrobert Arts Centre is REALLY HARD TO FIND AND TO FIND PARKING AT! It’s deep into the university campus and there are teeny little signs for finding it by walking and it was all very confusing and made me hearken back to trying to find an 8am lecture at college and not realizing it was a 70 minute walk to the top of campus! anxietyyyy!
The show ran about 2 1/2 hours with intermission (Act I ran 14:36 (at least that’s the last phone screen I saw) to 15:49, Act II ended at 17:06). The website said it ran 150 minutes so like, freaking bravo on that accuracy. The first act flewwww by, I guess because I loved it.
As I said there were two big screens on each side of the stage with captions, which are mostly helpful, although they kept saying its’ which is not a word. This was apparently one of only two special captioned performances, but if they shifted them a little so the screens don’t block the action for the first few rows, I don’t see why they can’t have these all the time (and like…for most shows! If someone needs them and they don’t hurt then…? yes I’ve started watching TV with subtitles what about it).
