Displaying items by tag: fun home

Porchlight Music Theatre is proud to announce Fun Home: Behind the Show Backstory with Artistic Director Michael Weber, Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 7 p.m. at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St. Weber hosts this multimedia presentation about the Tony-award winning and Pulitzer Prize-nominated musical Fun Home and includes the history of Fun Home, insights into the production, fun facts and guest performances from cast members Neala Barron,  Z Mowry and Tessa Pundsack. Tickets are pay-what-you-can with a suggested donation of $25 and reservations may be made at PorchlightMusicTheatre.org.

Winner of seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical and a Pulitzer finalist, Fun Home is a refreshingly honest, emotional and revolutionary musical. Based on Alison Bechdel’s critically acclaimed graphic novel with a score from Jeanine Tesori, Fun Home shares how Bechdel unlocks memories, milestones and mysteries of her youth as she begins to write her first graphic novel. With a compassionate score and a brilliant script, Fun Home tells the story of seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

ABOUT PORCHLIGHT’S FUN HOME

January 16 - March 2, 2025

Music by Jeanine Tesori

Book and lyrics by Lisa Kron

Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel

Directed by Stephen Schellhardt

Music Directed by Heidi Joosten

Previews: Thursday, Jan. 16 - Friday, Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.

Performance Schedule: Thursdays - Fridays at 7:30 p.m.. Saturdays at 3 and 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. with additional performances Thursday, Jan. 23 at 2 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 30 at 2 p.m., Wednesday, Feb 5 at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb 12 at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb 19 at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb 26 at 7:30 p.m.

Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.

PorchlightMusicTheatre.org

Tickets: $20 - $85

CONTENT ADVISORY: verbal abuse, depictions of homophobia and a death by suicide as well as allusions to sexual contact between an adult and teenagers.

ABOUT PORCHLIGHT MUSIC THEATRE

Porchlight Music Theatre, entering its 30th season, is the award-winning center for music theatre in Chicago. Through live performance, youth education and community outreach, we impact thousands of lives each season, bringing the magic of musicals to our theatre home at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts in the Gold Coast and to neighborhoods across the city. Porchlight has built a national reputation for boldly reimagining classic musicals, supporting new works and young performers, and showcasing Chicago’s most notable music theatre artists, all through the intimate and powerful theatrical lens of the “Chicago Style.”

Porchlight's history over nearly three decades includes more than 70 mainstage works with 15 Chicago premieres and five world premieres.

Porchlight's education and outreach programs serve schools, youth of all ages and skill levels and community organizations. Porchlight annually awards dozens of full scholarships and hundreds of free tickets to ensure accessibility and real engagement with this uniquely American art form.

The company’s many honors include 178 Joseph Jefferson Award (Jeff) nominations and 50 Jeff awards, as well as 44 Black Theatre Alliance (BTA) nominations and 15 BTA awards. In 2019, Porchlight graduated to the Large Theatre tier of the Equity Jeff Awards and has been honored with seven awards in this tier to date including Best Ensemble for Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies (2019) and Best Production-Revue for Blues in the Night (2022).

Through the global pandemic, Porchlight emerged as one of Chicago’s leaders in virtual programming, quickly launching a host of free offerings like Sondheim @ 90 Roundtables, Movie Musical Mondays, Porchlight by Request: Command Performances and WPMT: Classic Musicals from the Golden Age of Radio. In 2021, Porchlight launched its annual summer series, Broadway in your Backyard, performing at parks and venues throughout the city.

Fun Home is not merely a well-crafted, excellent musical in every sense of the word but an important one. Fittingly winning the Tony award for Best Musical the same year same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, Fun Home is the first Broadway musical to feature a lesbian protagonist. Beyond that, it is also the first musical to discuss homosexuality in such an open way. The main character, Alison, discovers and learns about her own sexuality the same time her father, Bruce, is battling with his. Her coming out of the closet coincides so aptly with his repression into it that it's amazing they didn't run into each other in the doorway. 

Based on writer and cartoonist Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, the story told in Fun Home -- already dramatic and engaging on its own -- becomes that much more poignant due to the fact that it is true. This was Bechdel's life, and it is an extremely personal tale that requires a paradoxical balance of vulnerability and courage to tell.

Non-linear, like Bechdel's memoir, and brimming with intelligence, humor, and frustration, Fun Home is less a typical musical than it is a dramatic play with songs sprinkled in. Where you won't find big show-stopping numbers that burst onto the scene, you'll find elegant, pretty melodies that extend organically from significant moments in the story. The protagonist, Alison, is portrayed by three actresses to encompass her lifespan thus far: Small Al, Middle Al, and Big Al -- or just Al, who is present-day Alison writing and narrating her story.

Her father Bruce serves as both a mirror of and partial antagonist to Alison. As is said in the musical a couple of times, the heart of Fun Home is that Alison and Bruce are "nothing alike" and "exactly alike." Al's relationship with her father is set against the backdrop of their functionally dysfunctional family, with Al's two brothers playing a part as well as Helen, their mother and the long-suffering wife of Bruce. An English teacher, intellectual, and funeral director -- their house doubles as a funeral home, from where the title is derived -- Bruce fusses over every aspect of their family house, improving and embellishing every detail in a clear projection of the lack of control he feels he has over his own life, all the while subjecting the rest of the family to his obsession.

Fun Home doesn't shy away from anything. Big ideas are conveyed through small details, which include everything from the seemingly most mundane aspects of life (like cleaning the house) to the most intimate and even somewhat embarrassing (like after Al's first sexual experience with a girl when she adorably and giddily freaks out, declaring she's "changing [her] major to Joan.") It's funny, poignant, sad, and most of all, honest.

It is the least cheesy musical you will ever see.

On top of its artistic integrity alone, Fun Home is an extremely important musical for LGBT awareness. It brings the (to some, distant or fearsome) ideas of homosexuality and "coming out" to the stage and airs them out in a way that demystifies them and, by default, normalizes them. This is the first step to achieving acceptance: removing fear and saying, "Yes. This is normal. This messed up family that happens to include some gay people is just like your messed up family that happens to include some straight people." It can really be that simple, thanks to shows like Fun Home that are unafraid to be real.

Fun Home is playing at the Oriental Theater through November 13th.