Home is where the heartbreak is

FUN HOME is the hardest musical this reviewer has ever had to watch. Not that it's bad - on the contrary, it's very, very good. But it's also tough, raw, intimate and profoundly sad. It's about secrets you carry inside you for so long, you eventually implode. It's about emotional wounds that never heal, even if you had people around you who loved you. It's about how your own family can be the tumour you cannot remove without killing yourself.

The musical is based on Alison Bechdel's 2006 best-selling, gut-wrenching graphic memoir of the same title. Adapted into a 2013 musical by composer Jeanine Tesori and book writer and lyricist Lisa Kron, it won five Tony awards including Best Musical in 2015.

This new staging by local theatre company Pangdemonium feels somewhat sadder than the original Broadway version this reviewer watched two years ago, perhaps because there are fewer grace notes of love and compassion between the various members of the dysfunctional Bechdel family. It feels so unrelentingly sad sometimes, you want to look away - but you don't because the story is too compact to miss a moment.