Family sadness redeemed by song in MVT’s ‘Fun Home’

Being true to herself and honest with her parents are the challenges faced by the heroine of “Fun Home,” the bold, funny and searing winner of the 2015 Tony Award for best musical that opened Thursday in an irresistibly exuberant production at Manoa Valley Theatre.

With music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, the play is adapted from “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” a 2006 graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in which she explores her relationship with her troubled, domineering father. Alison at different ages is portrayed by three equally wonderful, convincing actors. Aided by an evocative stage design that splits the action between the Bechdel family’s overdecorated Victorian mansion, a college dorm room, an apartment above the New York City gay hub of Christopher Street, and an artist’s loft, the narrator, an adult Alison played with sardonic brilliance and grace by Nicole Brilhante Shepard, looks down and comments on scenes from her life.

The child Alison was portrayed with astonishing poignancy by Ember Isabelo on opening night (she alternates with Bella Zambuto in the role), whose star turns range from a song demanding that her dad play airplanes with her to a wonderstruck torch song for a “handsome” delivery woman with a ring of keys.

Natalie Borsky embodies a warm, vulnerable teenage Alison who discovers her sexuality in college, falls in love with the wise and elegant Joan (Kela Neil), and sings about it in a sweet and comic number, “Changing My Major.”

But while Alison immediately comes out to her parents, her father, Bruce (LeGrand Lawerence), remains painfully closeted as a gay man.

Alison, her loving mother (Alison Aldercroft) and two younger brothers (Melody Grace Hamilton and Greg Gilbertson) try to please Bruce, a physically imposing, autocratic aesthete who teaches high school English in their rural Pennsylvania town and has obsessively restored and furnished the old house. Verbally abusive to his wife, shaming his daughter when she prefers boys’ clothes, Bruce demands order, but the children are irrepressible and chaotic life bursts out.

“Fun” is short for the funeral home that is the family’s business (Bruce is also the mortician), and the show-stopping number belongs to the three precocious Bechdel kids performing “Come To The Fun Home” with a coffin as a prop and Katherine L. Jones’ witty choreography.

A central theme is high versus pop culture, and Bruce tells Alison she has the stuff to be a real artist, not just a cartoonist. For school, she’s trying to make a map of every place everyone in their family’s ever been, from Pennsylvania to Europe, where Bruce served in the military.

Although he talks a high line, we get glimpses of Bruce in creepy, covert seduction attempts with a series of much younger men played by Nicholas Amador.

Maps give needed perspective, and the adult Alison keeps working on her map throughout the play, as well as trying to retroactively communicate with her father in the touching songs “Telephone Wire” and “Edges of the World.” The aerial overview provided by maps is linked to the play’s central metaphor of flight as freedom of imagination, something that children can teach their parents.

A few criticisms — the singers are over-mic’ed, and some fall out of tune — can be easily resolved by better attention to the musical mix. They are outweighed by the pleasure of live music, here provided by an offstage ensemble.

Anyone who’s had difficulty talking with those they love about their identity, feelings and dreams, will find comfort — and courage — in MVT’s splendid “Fun Home.”