ajhlovestheatre

FUN HOME

Music by Jeanine Tesori

Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron 

based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel

directed by Sarah Frankcom

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester – until 1 August 2026

running time: 100 minutes no interval 

https://www.royalexchange.co.uk/event/fun-home/

Although Fun Home breaks so many of the rules of traditional musical theatre (only a handful of real numbers, although music runs through, under and over the dialogue like an extra character, a female lead who mainly watches from the sidelines, a deeply flawed anti-hero who makes some appalling choices), every time I see it I become more convinced it’s the most perfect modern tuner. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron have created a searing modern classic. Sarah Frankcom’s stunning in-the-round production for Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre matches the brilliance of Sam Gold’s original New York and London versions and Róisín McBrinn’s stylishly sepulchral Dublin staging a couple of years ago. There are certain visual choices dictated by Alison Bechdel in the autobiographical graphic novel upon which this Olivier-nominated and Tony-winning Best Musical is based, that each iteration shares, but every version to date is distinctive and finds new colours in this unique musical. 

Visual artist Alison Bechdel grew up with the suspicion that her father Bruce – teacher, aesthete and a funeral director – was gay, only to have that confirmed when he took his own life within months of her own coming out, and she committed her unconventional family history to a pictorial novel that is part exorcism, part exploration. The title is the jokey name the Bechdels gave to the family undertaking business (funeral home = fun home). Kron’s fine script depicts Alison in triplicate: the older woman, played here by Jodie McNee, an artist sitting at her drawing table, summoning up images and figures from her damaged past, the college kid (Alice Audrey O’Hanlon) joyfully discovering love and her own sexuality for the first time, and the child, exuberant but watchful (Harriet O’Shea at the performance I saw, but the kids roles are alternately played by three different teams). It’s a neat, dramatically satisfying concept and one that becomes almost unbearably moving when the three of them interact, as they do in ‘Flying Away’, the luminous, releasing finale.

Tesori has composed the music to three of the greatest American musical theatre scores of the last twenty years (the others being Caroline, or Change and award-winning Kimberly Akimbo, about to get its UK premiere at Hampstead) and her work is so eclectically in tune with the requirements of situation, character and time period that it almost doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Fun Home pastiches the 1970s TV themes that Bechdel grew up with, mixes it up with folk and pop, and then cross-fertilises with an intensity and lyrical beauty that recalls Sondheim at his most interesting. Kron’s lyrics and book make the transition between speech and song barely noticeable. If a tenet of musical theatre is that characters burst into song when they have no other means of expressing themselves, Fun Home is a prime example of that. The score has sweep and drama, a delightful specificity and, at times, an endearing oddness. Snatches of melody shimmer and tantalise, occasionally blossoming into a full blown number, and nothing ever feels wasted.

Visually, this Fun Home is quietly astounding, employing a couple of revolves and a giant, circular light installation that unfurls like a flower, or, less benignly, like a swirling gigantic hydra that threatens to swallow whole the humans engulfed in painful memories and conflicts below. Peter Butler’s scenic design is pretty abstract, augmented by some pieces of antique furniture and at one point an actual coffin, but still gives a strong sense of time and place. Bethany Gupwell’s lighting bathes much of the action in the warm golden glow of memory before whitening out the colour pallet to something stark and unforgiving as the story approaches its shattering, inevitable climax. Yshani Perinpanayagam’s six piece band, perched on one of the upper galleries, sounds impressive and textured but never overwhelms the voices. 

The show is beautifully cast. McNee’s Alison compellingly puts herself through hell remembering traumas past but also finds a compassion for her late, troubled Dad that is tremendously affecting. She’s wonderful, and so is O’Hanlon’s Medium Alison, so open and confused, then enraptured before imperceptibly toughening up as she realises her own survival may depend on drawing a veil over her troubled home life.

Harriet O’Shea’s Small Alison conveys the serious watchfulness of a child who has seen way more than a person of so few years ever should have, and her version of the iconic ‘Ring of Keys’ number where the little girl gets an inkling of her authentic nature (“Why am I the only one who sees you’re beautiful? No, I mean…handsome”) is superb.

As Joan, the rebellious student who becomes Alison’s first love, Natasha Cottriall is gloriously stroppy yet kind, suggesting both a safe haven and a force of nature. As the various men seduced and captivated by Bruce, Lucca Chadwick-Patel registers potently.

Alex Young subtly astonishes as Alison’s mother Helen, an educator and community theatre actress all too aware of the unconventional nature of her marriage. Young offers a nuanced, painfully honest portrayal of a woman for whom being on edge is her permanent default mode, but who’s smart enough to see the damage being wrought. Every student of acting through song needs to see Young’s extraordinary version of ‘Days And Days’, simultaneously a cri de coeur aria, an admission of complicity and a warning. It simply doesn’t get better than this.

Nigel Harman as Bruce is quite different from any of his predecessors, giving us less the self-hating, pernickety closeted man marinated in shame and disillusion, and more the self-possessed ‘sliver fox’ who on some level feels he’s entitled to have it all. When he sings “I might still break a heart or two” we are in no doubt that he believes it. His arrogance gives way to an almost childlike tentativeness once he realises he and Alison are cut from similar cloth. The sense of a man who imposes painstaking rigour and precision on his restoration of artefacts and antiques to mask his messy and murky inner life is still keenly felt, and his flashes of incandescent rage are utterly chilling. This is career-redefining work, magnificently well sung and shedding thrilling new light on one of the most fascinating and problematic leading roles in all musical theatre.

Ultimately, Fun Home, especially when done as well as it is here, demonstrates that something unremittingly sad can prove utterly exhilarating, with that shaft of light that illuminates the darker recesses of the human soul. This Manchester premiere is an unabashed triumph, a world class version of a beautiful gut-punch of a musical. Do not miss it, and take tissues.