Joel Perez | This Week in New York

FUN HOME has been transformed into a whole new experience on Broadway (photo © Joan Marcus)

Circle in the Square Theatre
1633 Broadway at 50th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 13, $75-$150
funhomebroadway.com

The best off-Broadway musical of last season is now the best Broadway musical of this season. Fun Home hasn’t merely transferred from the Public’s Newman Theater downtown to Circle in the Square on the Great White Way; it has been positively transformed, with returning director Sam Gold and set designer David Zinn making ingenious use of the small, intimate space, the audience surrounding the famed Circle in the Square stage. Nominated for eight Drama Desk Awards last year, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s magical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s genre-defining graphic memoir is even better the second time around. The deeply personal story delves into the dysfunction of the Bechdel family: father Bruce (Michael Cerveris) is a high school English teacher, a restorer of old houses, and a funeral home director (which leads the kids to call it Fun Home); mother Helen (Judy Kuhn) plays the piano and has a yen for the theater; and younger children Christian (Oscar Williams) and John (Zell Steele Morrow) look up to their older sister, Alison, who is played as an eight-year-old by Sydney Lucas, as an eighteen-year-old by Emily Skeggs, and as a forty-three-year-old adult by Beth Malone. Malone is onstage for the full hundred minutes, watching her character’s life unfold before her. “I don’t trust memory,” she says early on, explaining why she is constantly drawing. When she goes off to college, she finds out something about herself that confuses and scares her — as well as a dark family secret that shakes her already complicated world.

Older Alison (Beth Malone) sketches her college-age self (Emily Skeggs) in FUN HOME (photo © Joan Marcus)

The staging is simply sensational, although there’s nothing simple about it. Furniture, from doors and tables to a console television, a bed, and a casket, rises up and down from beneath the floor as the scenes change, keeping the narrative flowing at a calm, even pace despite the building angst and turmoil. Tesori’s (Violet; Caroline, or Change) music and Kron’s (2.5 Minute Ride, Well) book and lyrics continue to soar, from the outrageously funny “Changing My Major” to the Partridge Family homage “You Are Like a Raincoat,” from the incredibly clever “Ring of Keys” to the mellifluous “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” with the crack band onstage (and enjoying the show as well when they’re not playing). The cast, once again, is outstanding, with Cerveris just the right bit on edge as Bruce; Kuhn splendidly tentative and nervous as Helen; Lucas a powerhouse as the creative small Alison; Skeggs terrific as the wide-eyed, curious middle Alison; Roberta Colindrez delightful as Joan, a lesbian who catches Alison’s eye at Oberlin; and Joel Perez as multiple characters, including Roy, a handyman who helps out around the house. But Gold’s (The Realistic Joneses, The Flick) revamped staging sheds more light on the adult Alison and Malone’s subtly beautiful performance; instead of existing on the periphery as an observer, she is now right in the middle of everything, sometimes sitting down next to one of her younger selves, getting a much more close-up look into her childhood without getting overly sentimental. (The same can practically be said about the audience.) The Broadway version of Fun Home is so extraordinary, it’s made me nearly forget about the marvelous original production.

Small Alison (Sydney Lucas) and her father (Michael Cerveris) try to find common ground in FUN HOME (photo by Joan Marcus)

The Public Theater, Newman Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
Extended through January 12, $81.50 – $91.50
212-967-7555
www.publictheater.org

In the opening scene of the Public Theater’s marvelous adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home, the forty-three-year-old Alison (Beth Malone) is watching her father, Bruce (Michael Cerveris), play with her eight-year-old self (Sydney Lucas). “Dad, I know you think cartoons are silly, but I draw cartoons,” she says. “And I need real things to draw from because I don’t trust memory.” That adult version of Alison is onstage throughout the 105-minute musical, standing at her drawing table or walking around David Zinn’s changing sets as she watches her younger selves, ages eight and eighteen (Alexandra Socha), deal with their difficult father and not-so-clueless mother, Helen (Judy Kuhn), who chooses to look the other way at her husband’s dangerous indiscretions. The award-winning graphic novel was subtitled A Family Tragicomic, and the show maintains that sensibility as it centers on Bechdel’s (Dykes to Watch Out For) complex relationship with her father, an English teacher and funeral home (“fun home”) director obsessed with historic restoration and, as it turns out, young men and boys. Composer Jeanine Tesori (Thoroughly Modern Millie; Caroline, or Change) and book writer and lyricist Lisa Kron (In the Wake, Well) have transformed Fun Home into a compelling musical that intelligently brings the intimate coming-of-age story to life, with plenty of charm and humor accompanying the anger and fear. When the teenage Alison goes off to college, she discovers that she is a lesbian, falling in love with the strong-minded Joan (Roberta Colindrez); “I’m changing my major to sex with Joan,” Alison sings in one of the show’s most entertaining numbers. As Alison learns more about herself, she also discovers her father’s big secret, leading to a tragedy that she is still trying to understand.

Current-day Alison (Beth Malone) watches in darkness as teenage self (Alexandra Socha) gets serious with her mother (Judy Kuhn) in stirring adaptation of graphic novel (photo by Joan Marcus)

Director Sam Gold (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation) does a terrific job navigating among the three Alisons, each one dealing with Bruce in different ways as they grow up, along with the various musical styles, which include the Partridge Family send-up “You Are Like a Raincoat” and Small Alison and her brothers’ (Griffin Birney and Noah Hinsdale) mock commercial “Come to the Fun Home.” Cerveris (Assassins, Nikolai and the Others) infuses his character with an edgy creepiness that is always threatening to explode, while Kuhn (Chess, Les Misérables) excels in her significantly smaller role. The three Alisons form a fascinating whole, with Lucas a bundle of positive energy in her off-Broadway debut, Socha (Spring Awakening) displaying a complex combination of dread and hope, and Malone remaining cool and calm as her childhood passes before her eyes. Fun Home, which has been extended through December 29, is a uniquely told, thoroughly satisfying story that examines those critical moments in life that help define who we are, and who we become.