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ART S & CUL T URE

By DARYL H. MILLER
FEB 23, 2017 | 6:30 AM
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Jeanine Tesori, among the most-nominated composers in Tony Awards history, wrote the music for
"Fun Home," now at the Ahmanson Theatre. (Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times)  
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The sounds of a rambunctious household are turned into music as "Fun Home" sifts
through one woman's 1970s childhood, seeking clues to her father's abrupt death.

Jeanine Tesori, the show's composer, thought back to her own youth as the creative
team envisioned the household of Alison Bechdel, author of the popular graphic-
novel-style memoir on which the stage musical is based.

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Tesori and her three sisters studied piano, flute or dance. "We were practicing all
the time," she says. "With four girls in the house, there was a fair amount of noise."

She replicates that cacophony in "Fun Home," which won the 2015 Tony Award for
best musical and just opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in a touring production.

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Typically, the noise is a happy sound. There's even a song in which young Bechdel
and her brothers devise a chirpy commercial for the family funeral business. But the
soundscape darkens as the adult Bechdel wrestles with the cloudy circumstances of
her father's death, as well as the timing: She'd recently come out to her family as
lesbian, then learned that he too was gay, though deeply closeted.

"I'm very interested in the counterpoint of the household," Tesori says, neatly
repurposing a musical term to describe the family's separate yet
simultaneous activities.

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Family life is a repeated reference point as Tesori, 55 and mother of a 19-year-old

daughter, reflects on the career that has made her one of the most-nominated
composers in Tony Award history.

She grew up in a home where science met the arts. Her father was a doctor, her
mother a nurse, but "both parents really believed that every kid had to have some
kind of artistic expression," she says.

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That duality imbues the way that Tesori talks about music. "It's where the mystery
and the science meet," she says by phone from her apartment on New York's Upper
West Side. "Music, for me, is like the architecture of a beautiful thing you're
envisioning, and the way to get there is intervallic, it's mathematic. And then there
is the soul and the heart."

Her first musical, 1997's "Violet," is about a disfigured young woman from rural
North Carolina who yearns to be healed. In 2003's "Caroline, or Change," two more
lonely souls seek wholeness. One is a Jewish boy who's lost his mother, the other
is his family's single-mom black housekeeper, who worries about her children's
future in early-'60s America.

Life for these characters is messy, contradictory and unresolved — a straightforward

realism that exists even in Tesori's more mainstream projects.

She contributed to the musical pastiche of 2000's "Thoroughly Modern Millie," a

daffy rom-com that plumbs unexpected depths as a wannabe flapper finds
wholeness that far surpasses her original notions of thoroughly modern
womanhood. And the outwardly conventional "Shrek: The Musical" from 2008
gives the lovelorn ogre's tale a proudly nonconformist spin as it champions its
bookshelf-full of shunned and demeaned storybook characters.

"Millie" bounces to the beat of the early 1920s; "Violet" twangs with bluegrass;
"Caroline" throbs with klezmer and soul; and "Shrek" bounds through the Top 40
and animated-musical catalogs. The shows sound entirely different, but they share
the Tesori hallmarks of close-to-the-surface emotion, structural rigor and rhythmic
drive. Her music is brainy yet immediately accessible.

"Angels in America" playwright Tony Kushner, who asked Tesori to collaborate with
him on "Caroline," says she has "that gift of liberating very deep feeling in an
audience. There's an openhearted emotionality, a way of using music to make your
heart explode."

Sutton Foster, who has played more Tesori heroines than anyone else — in "Millie,"
"Shrek" and a 2014 revival of "Violet" — enjoys the variety in Tesori's scores.
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the left turn and stretching and doing the unexpected — different sounds, different
feels."

Outsiders figure prominently in all of Tesori's shows, whether she initiated the
project, as with "Violet," or was asked aboard. She describes the characters as "the
people who are deemed invisible, are outside the power structure in some way."

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"I have felt like that," she says. "I went outside myself a lot as a kid. I had a very
complicated relationship with my dad, who was a very brilliant and dissatisfied
person. So I became an observer, and when you pull out of yourself and you are
watching the world, you really begin to see in a 360 the people who are not getting
the attention. I feel like that's where my heart goes."

Tesori was nominated for Tony Awards for “Millie,” “Caroline” and “Shrek,” as well
as for her incidental music for a 1998 Lincoln Center Theater production of
Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” She finally got to take home a trophy when she and
“Fun Home” librettist Lisa Kron won the 2015 original-score Tony, contributing to
the show’s total of five.

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Kate Shindle as Alison Bechdel looks toward an earlier version of her family, played by, from left,
Lennon Nate Hammond, Robert Petkoff, Alessandra Baldacchino, Susan Moniz and Pierson Salvador in  
the touring production of "Fun Home." (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

"Fun Home" zigzags and circles through three stages in Bechdel's life: as a girl, as a
young woman of college age and as an omnipresent adult watching the other two.

The key events unfold across the '70s and dawn of the '80s. "I grew up then," Tesori
says, which meant she didn't need to do much research into the era — too bad, in a
way, because she loves to dive into different periods. "I'm a real musicologist at
heart," she says.

Tesori had in mind the women singer-songwriters of the era, especially Joni
Mitchell. Also playing in her head were Billy Preston; Talking Heads; Cat Stevens;
Blood, Sweat & Tears and Stevie Wonder.

She also dipped into classical music as she and Kron sought to depict a crucial
dichotomy in the Bechdel household. "Come to the Fun Home," the romping, '70s-
style commercial that the Bechdel children concoct, gives way to the infinitely more
complex sounds of "Helen's Étude," in which Helen, the mother, practices a
Chopin-like melody at the piano while in another room the father, Bruce, makes
small talk, subtly sprinkled with come-ons, with a young man he's hired to do
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"Everyone is siloed in their own world," Kron explains. "By having everybody
singing a different thing, there's a sense of them together as this family, and yet
there's a cacophonous separateness."

Audiences emerge talking about the songs "Ring of Keys," the tomboyish young
Bechdel's flash of recognition when she encounters a close-cropped, work-booted
deliverywoman, and "Changing My Major," in which college-age Bechdel goes giddy
over her first girlfriend.

The most telling moments, however, are less obvious, as in "Pony Girl," a snippet of
lullaby that Bruce sings to settle his daughter as he tries to sneak out for a night on
the town. The simple, a cappella melody gently rises and falls — a slow-motion tug
of war between contentment and mournfulness — as the repressed father yearns for
the courage that his daughter exhibits in her youthful independent streak. "Some
folks get the call to go," he sings, "some folks are bound to stay."

Bechdel says that when she first

heard the song, she found it "almost
too sentimental, but now I've come
to see that it adds a perfect
dimension to the play, which is this
story of the father and the daughter,
and the daughter moving on in a way
— A LI SON B E C HD E L O N S E E ING T HE S T A G E
V E RS IO N O F HE RS E L F S ING W I T H H E R
that the father couldn't."
F AM I LY

But then, Bechdel, who was

Share quote & link  
periodically interviewed but not part
of the creative team, has been
continually surprised by this show.
Turning her memoir into a musical
at first seemed "the craziest thing I'd ever heard," she says, yet witnessing the stage
version of herself sing with her family has been "magical and painful and cathartic
and just beautiful."

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Kron, a first-time librettist, underwent an intensive apprenticeship under Tesori,

yet even now, she says, "I just get glimpses of all the ways she's operating in that
score. Nothing stands alone; everything is building and intertwined with everything
else."

Tesori admits to her own naiveté back in her early 30s when she switched to
composing after being mentored by prolific record producer and music supervisor
Buryl Red and gigging relentlessly as a musical-theater conductor.

"It was all guesswork," Tesori says of creating "Violet" with librettist Brian Crawley.
"It was so hunt and peck, absolute learn by doing."

Her output now includes operas, film scores and animated musicals.

Tesori doesn't write lyrics because, she self-deprecatingly says, "you can't get more
average than me." She prefers to collaborate with playwrights, who already "work
with the musicality of language" even if they aren't musicians.

She is working on projects with Kushner and "Shrek's" David Lindsay-Abaire, but
the next new score that Angelenos likely will hear is for David Henry Hwang's "Soft
Power," in which a present-day U.S. incident gets enshrined, several decades hence,
in a Chinese musical. The commission for Center Theatre Group is being prepared
for spring 2018 at the Ahmanson.

That show will require Tesori to imagine how musical theater might evolve on the
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side of the globe — yet another
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first sat down to learn piano at age 3.
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Music is "an odyssey," Tesori says, "where you go away from home, you develop,
and then you return different because of all the changes that have happened on the
way."

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

'Fun Home'

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays.
Ends April 1.

Tickets: $25-$125, subject to change

Contact: (213) 628-2772, centertheatregroup.org

daryl.miller@latimes.com

Twitter: @darylhmiller

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Daryl H. Miller has been besotted with the arts since age 5, once he was old enough to sing with the church
youth choir, and has yet to top the thrill of portraying Billy Bigelow in his rural high school’s production of
“Carousel.” He has been covering the arts in Southern California for three decades for the Los Angeles Times,
Daily News, LA Weekly, Orange County Register and other publications. He is also a copy editor.
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