Fun Home ★★★★★
It might be an exaggeration to claim that Fun Home, the Jeanine Tesori-Lisa Kron musical, helped change the course of the recent-day Broadway musical. Or maybe not.
When the show first appeared in the fall of 2013 at the Public’s Newman Theater—the very same space where A Chorus Line first danced in 1975—it was a new sort of musical. Uncompromising source material; an altogether nontraditional way of melding story with song; the use of musical numbers as cudgels, blasting audiences with explosive and exhilarating surprise; and from first moment to last, a thorough avoidance of standard-formula musical making.
It was thrilling to see something so perfect, down at the Newman. Along came industrious producers who not only determined to move it to uptown—and how large an audience could there possibly be?—but to take it to an historically unprofitable playhouse with limited commercial capacity. They painstakingly prepared Fun Home for Broadway, finally opening in the spring of 2015. Audiences, critics, and awards voters all embraced the show, as did a large audience not traditionally found on Broadway.
The immediate success of Fun Home opened the way for three subsequent unlikely musicals, each of which followed the path from one of New York’s major non-profits and opened on Broadway to sold-out houses more logically expected for star-driven commercial spectacles. Fun Home, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and The Band’s Visit mark the new frontier of Broadway, holding their own (and taking the last four Best Musical Tony Awards) against “big” musicals like Frozen, SpongeBob, and Mean Girls. These are all high-quality, if very different, shows. It turns out, nowadays, that excellence is its own reward.
Which takes us to London and the Young Vic, where director Sam Gold and his original production team have conjured a Fun Home as embracingly exciting as earlier productions. The cast is equally excellent. Leading the group (for me), on Broadway and off, was Judy Kuhn as the mother Helen. Most happily, Jenna Russell, best known in New York as Dot in the 2008 Menier Chocolate Factory production of Sunday in the Park with George, is equally strong. Methinks that at least part of this has to do with the material Tesori and Kron have written for the character, and the manner in which Gold isolates her throughout the evening.
Zubin Varla makes a rather different Bruce, tending towards paternal harshness and meanness while the New York counterpart seemed more outwardly restrained by his inner turmoil. Kaisa Hammarlund and Eleanor Kane, as the adult and medium Alisons, offer performances as distinctive as their predecessors. The three youngster roles, as is common in London production, are double cast; the trio at the performance attended was delightful.
Major changes to the production are in evidence, not in the material but in the scenic department. There is a big, stage-wide wall which cuts off the familiar set as they begin the Bleecker Street apartment scene. While off-putting at first, it quickly transpires that Gold and set designer David Zinn are using this white surface as isolated cartoon panels, and to great effect. When Alison calls Bruce from college, the father is boxed in a far smaller panel—instantly suggesting his dangerous emotional state. One suspects this additional scenery, as well as a grand scenic surprise in the final appearance of the house set, were devised for the 2016 US tour. And who would imagine that a Broadway musical with such uncompromising material would find success in the not-always-so-progressive hinterlands?
Excellence is, I suppose, its own reward.
The Aristocrats ★★★
Irish playwright Brian Friel found international fame with the 1964 play Philadelphia Here I Come!, which swept Dublin, London, and Broadway. He remained active and celebrated through the end of the century, with works including the 1992 Tony-winner Dancing at Lughnasa. Friel has been justly celebrated since his death in 2015, with a highly acclaimed production of Translations just concluded at the National. Director Lyndsey Turner, who has staged Donmar Warehouse productions of Friel’s Faith Healer, Fathers and Sons, and Philadelphia, now returns with his 1979 play Aristocrats.
The play, which seems to fall just below the author’s top shelf, is set in a cherry orchard in his fictional town of Ballybeg. Well, not precisely in a Cherry Orchard; but you get the idea. It is the late 1970s (i.e., when the play was written), and these last remnants of Irish aristocracy are unsuccessfully clutching to their family manse and a way of life long past. The raging, all-but-unseen patriarch of the clan sits in a room upstairs, with a newly installed baby monitor keeping the family below on alert. Three sisters cope, the long-suffering Judith (Eileen Walsh), who shines with her delivery of some riveting speeches; manic depressive Claire (Aisling Loftus), who sits at the (invisible) piano playing Chopin; and alcoholic Alice (Elaine Cassidy), who lives in London with her abusive husband. Most troubled, perhaps, is the only O’Donnell son, Casimir (David Dawson, who gives an exceptional performance and pretty much carries the play). But time has passed by these aristocrats, and Ballybeg Hall slips from their hands as we watch.
This works effectively in Friel’s brief third act. Too much of the first, though, is taken up with gradually introducing us to the characters and their personalities. Some of these are indeed fascinating, like Casimir—who continually refers to his apparently fictitious wife and children in Germany, and old Uncle George (Ciaran McIntyre) who silently wanders through the action in ghostly mien until undertaking a full speech at the play’s climax.
Designer Es Devlin has provided an exterior set, something of a wide basin of a playing area featuring a doll’s house of grand proportions which represents the mansion. The upstage wall is an indeterminate green. As the play progresses, Uncle George does little other than pick away at the wall, as if he is pulling away paint scraps. This reveals, in small portions at first and in its entirety at the beginning of act three, a fully lush 19th century panorama of the aristocratic O’Donnells on the shores of Ballybeg.
The peeling away of the upstage surface, alas, is the most memorable aspect of this production of Aristocrats.
Fun Home opened June 27, 2018, at the Young Vic (London) and ran through September 1. Tickets and information: youngvic.org
The Aristocrats opened August 10, 2018 at the Donmar Warehouse (London) and runs through September 22. Tickets and information: donmarwarehouse.com
