Review: “Fun Home” at Paramount’s Copley Theatre in Aurora – Chicago Tribune

For fans of “Fun Home,” the 2015 Broadway musical by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori that won five Tony Awards, a trip to downtown Aurora in coming weeks is essential. There’s a Metra train from the city and west suburbs; the station is only a five-minute walk to the theater.

I’m not messing around here. I’ve seen this show five times, including a fine 2017 Gary Griffin production at Victory Gardens Theater, back when that now fraught institution was both fun and a home. But the Paramount Theatre artistic director Jim Corti, far and away Chicago’s most accomplished director of musicals, and co-conspirator Landree Fleming have achieved something quite remarkable here with an exquisitely crafted and deeply intimate production that achieves a level of emotional intensity I’ve never seen before with this piece — even in its widely acclaimed original production.

If you don’t know “Fun Home,” it’s a memoir musical, based on a graphic novel by the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Bechdel, also the protagonist, drew cartoon panels of her life growing up in the 1970s in a small Pennsylvania town. Her father owned a funeral home, which his kids rationalized with the adjective in the title. As with the great HBO show “Six Feet Under,” that proximity of traumatizing death to quotidian domesticity caused a strange combination of acceptance and denial that is beautifully exploited in this show.

All great musicals are about death, in some way. Every last one.

But “Fun Home” is also about life in that it contrasts the blossoming sexuality of Alison, richly played at various ages here by Maya Keane (alternating with Milla Liss), Elizabeth Stenholt and Emilie Modaff, with the agony faced by her own father, Bruce (Stephen Schellhardt), a closeted gay man. That’s partly because of Bruce’s own choices in marrying Helen (Emily Rohm) and denying his own self, but it’s mostly a consequence of when he happened to be born. Watching the show Thursday night, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of just how much harder life becomes when you age, not that I did not already know.

The production is rich in truths and is utterly shorn of the artifice that some hate about Broadway musicals, even this one. That’s because the scene work is so good, especially that which involves Stenholt, the pivotal so-called “Middle Alison” and a young actress pulsing here with insecurity and hope. Schellhardt, an actor long known for truthful work, imbues everything with authenticity, foregrounding the cold side of his character to find the fulness of that veracity. Corti surely knows of the dramatic power of paradox.

But the performance that truly knocked me out in a rich cast came from Rohm, a pitch-perfect performer who spent years in Chicago theater playing Disney princesses and the like. She has graduated far beyond. Helen is a very difficult assignment: she is either angry or upset most of the time and reactive rather than self-determinate. But Rohm burrows so deep here, she turns her character into the moral consciousness of the show, throwing not just her cheating husband into sharp relief but even her self-dramatizing daughter, rendered in triplicate. In so many ways, Rohm is what makes this production so different from all the others: I could see the Paramount Theatre audience, not necessarily people familiar with this kind of musical, leaning into her work. And crucially, Rohm’s emotional centrality in the whole prevents the character of Alison from becoming a hagiography. If you love this piece, as do I, will you know what I mean.

“Fun Home” is not staged in the main Paramount Theatre but in the restored and upgraded Copley Theatre across the street. This was my first time at that venue, which feels a lot like the old Apple Tree Theatre in Highland Park.

There are many places to see plays. I hope Paramount devotes this space going forward to small, challenging musicals, new and old, leveraging its proven strengths, including its typically superb musical direction, its commitment to full orchestrations (as here) and its offering top-drawer designers different challenges.

This theater has gained the trust of its musical-loving audience. Those folks, I feel sure, will be there watching.

Everybody of course, can relate to something in “Fun Home.” It is always great to sit in the dark and feel that discovery happen all around. Especially from those who came under duress.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com

Review: “Fun Home” (4 stars)

When: Through Sept. 18

Where: Paramount’s Copley Theatre, 8 E. Galena Blvd., Aurora

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Tickets: $67 and up at (630) 896-6666 and paramountaurora.com

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