Near the beginning of the fascinating musical-comedy-tragedy FUN HOME, the lead character Alison tells the audience that in the show, the father and daughter (Alison) are both gay, and, while she’s away at college, her father will kill himself.  When he isn’t running a funeral home, teaching high school English, and hunting for antiques, Dad’s having affairs with local handymen and former students, and scheduling out-of-town trips for further assignations. Mom knows what’s going on (“One time he brought home bed lice”), but repression and escapism are themes. Not that there aren’t laughs. Father and daughter share a taste for gallows humor, as heard in their lyrical twist on the familiar duet they play on the family piano:

“Heart and soul

Jean Stafford must have loved

Robert Lowell

Because he treated her

Badly

They took the same romantic path

As Hughes and Plath…”

Jean Tesori composed the music for Fun Home. (She wrote the music for Tony Kushner’s great 2003 Tonya Pinkins vehicle Caroline, or Change.) The lyrics are by Lisa Kron. Along with William Finn (Falsettos), Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party), Adam Guettel (The Light in the Piazza), Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey (Next to Normal), Scott Frankel and Michael Korie (Grey Gardens), Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen), and Jason Robert Brown (The Bridges of Madison County), Tesori and Kron are among the Sons and Daughters of Sondheim, the smart kids with tricky chord changes and an absolute belief in the commercial stage as a platform for therapeutic catharsis. Without them (and Lin-Manuel Miranda, who serves brilliant exteriority to the Sondheim acolytes’ interiority), the Broadway musical would be a wasteland of jukebox mash-ups, endless revivals, Andrew Lloyd Webber bombast, and Disney vacuity.

“Alison” is Alison Bechdel, creator of the beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (which ran from 1983–2008) and the graphic-novel memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) on which the theater piece is based. The subject, the meaning, and the existence of the book and the show depend on how Alison accepts or rejects all the things her father taught her—his sense of aesthetics, his emphasis on the importance of artistic expression, and his insistence that she pay attention.

FUN HOME, through April 1, 2017.

Tuesday through Friday at 8 pm; Saturday at 2 pm and 8 pm; Sunday at 1 pm and 6:30 pm. Dark on Mondays, except March 27 at 8 pm.  Added weekday matinee on Thursday, March 30 at 2 pm.

AHMANSON THEATRE, Music Center, Los Angeles.

centertheatregroup.org/tickets/ahmanson-theatre/2016-17/fun-home/

Karen Eilbacher as Joan (left) and Abby Corrigan as Medium Alison in Fun Home.
Photograph by Joan Marcus.
Copyright © 2016 by Joan Marcus