PUBLISHED September 29th, 2017 05:00 am | UPDATED July 25th, 2024 02:58 pm
Usually presenting one musical per season – such as RENT last year – the folks at Pangdemonium are wrapping up their 2017 season with FUN HOME, the Tony Award-winning Best Musical based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir. Featuring music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics by Lisa Kron, the production earned twelve nominations at the 2015 Tony Awards and went on to win five Tonys (the most of any show in the season), including Best Musical, Best Score, Best Book and Best Direction (by Sam Gold).
If you are wondering why Alison Bechdel’s name sounds so familiar, it’s because she came up with the “Bechdel Test”. Revered by cinephiles, the test is a set of rules for determining a movie’s female-friendliness by measuring its number of female characters and the kinds of conversations they have on-screen. Thus, it’s unsurprising that FUN HOME is the first Broadway show with a lesbian leading character and the first show written exclusively by women to ever win Best Musical.
Based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir, which explores her childhood growing up in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1970s, the musical, at its core, is about family. It focuses specifically on her parents, Helen and Bruce, and their role in her life. Bechdel builds the narrative around the tragic event of her father’s death.
In Pangdemonium’s production of FUN HOME, three different actresses portray Alison at three different ages. We see her at 10 years old, as a college freshman, and current day Allison, who spends the show trying her best to remember the pivotal moments in her life that culminated in her father’s death. Director of FUN HOME, Tracie Pang, shares more about the show:
Why did Pangdemonium choose FUN HOME for its 2017 season?
Our theme for the 2017 Season is “Family (and other natural disasters)”, and each production in the season has explored very specific and complex family dynamics. With FUN HOME, we were fascinated with the idea of a family living under the shadow of a deep, dark secret, and how this secret breeds such an insidious and intense web of mixed emotions that lasts a lifetime and beyond. Every member of the FUN HOME family is damaged in some way, and each one is living with a deep yearning and longing to be free. The writers of the musical have turned the novel into a piece that is faithful to the source material in its intensity and complexity, but is also so full of life, laughs and love, with wonderfully flawed characters, and heart-wrenchingly beautiful songs. It’s quite life-changing.
In FUN HOME, the part of Alison is played by three different actors. How easy was it to cast the three actors and the rest of the cast?
We get to know Alison at age 10, 19 and 43. We auditioned several actresses for the 43 year-old role, and Nikki Muller (who we have worked with previously on The Effect and Circle, Mirror, Transformation) possessed all the qualities that we were looking for – humour, curiosity, passion, compassion, and also the very valuable asset of having lived a varied and colourful life. Plus, we recognised that she has dramatic acting chops that would be pushed to the limit for this character and a gorgeous singing voice that she herself has never felt fully ready to unleash until now!
For “Medium Alison”, the 19-year-old, we were able to secure the services of Elena Wang, a Singaporean actress who graduated from LaSalle, who has been living and working in the States for the past few years. Elena was recently working on the Broadway production of Allegiance, and we are thrilled that FUN HOME as her homecoming production of sorts. She’s got a brilliant voice and is also funny as hell.
For the role of “Small Alison” we had a deluge of young actresses come out of the woodwork to audition. After many nerve-wracking and emotional rounds of singing/dancing/acting solo callbacks and group workshops, two gorgeous young ladies, Elly Gaskell and Chloe Choo, will be alternating in the pivotal role of Small Alison. This will be their first time taking on a major role in a professional production, we’re very excited to be able to continue with our mission to nurture young talent.
We also auditioned many boys for Alison’s brothers , and we’re happy to have on board Bjorn Haakenson, Aria Zhang and Damien Weber – all adorable, slightly ADHD, and ready to rock. Benjamin Kheng takes on several roles in the musical, one of which is a 70s pop star called Bobby Jeremy. We’ve wanted to work with Ben for a while now, so we’re glad to have found a role for him that he’s perfect for. We pretty much only had one actress in mind for the role of Mother – Monique Wilson, who was Kim in the West End’s Miss Saigon. Monique has one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking songs to sing, called Days and Days.
What do you hope that the audience takes home from Pangdemonium’s production of FUN HOME?
We hope that audiences will be moved to look at their own family, to think about burying grudges and resentment, to forgive, and to learn to love their family all over again. There is no such thing as a perfect family. And we are all by-products of our upbringing, but we owe it to ourselves to find our own path, and be ourselves. And sometimes part of that process is to let go of the past. To learn to accept and love oneself is one lesson that perhaps is the hardest to truly embrace, and FUN HOME shows us how important it is that we all try.
What is Pangdemonium planning for its 2018 Season – what can we look forward to?
Our 2018 Season is subtitled “Hope and Home”, and more details will be released very soon, so keep a lookout for it!
FUN HOME will run at the Drama Centre Theatre, Level 3, National Library Building, 100 Victoria Street, Singapore 188064 from 29 September to 15 October 2017. Tickets are available at SISTIC; for more information see Pangdemonium’s website.
All images, except where credited, are courtesy of Pangdemonium.