Quad-Cities Premiere of Tony-Winning “Fun Home” Opens Tonight at Moline’s Black Box
The consistently first-class Black Box Theatre in downtown Moline continues to produce shows that no other venue does in the Quad Cities, and the latest is the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” which will get its regional premiere here May 30 to June 14.
The Black Box (1623 5th Ave., Moline – full disclosure: I am playing keyboard for it) is presenting the acclaimed musical, based on the 2006 graphic memoir by the famous lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel (known for “Dykes to Watch Out For”). The adaptation features deeply moving, glorious and often fun music by Jeanine Tesori with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron.
The intense, emotional story is told in non-linear vignettes as Bechdel looks back on her life including her discovery of her own sexuality, her relationship with her closeted gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life. It was nominated for 12 Tony Awards in 2015 — winning five, including the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score, along with nominations for nine Lucille Lortel Awards (winning three, including Outstanding Musical), two Obie Awards, eight Drama Desk Awards.
Black Box Theatre’s new production of “Fun Home” features (from left) Sydney Richardson, Kylah Garris, Kat Jecklin, Brighton Greim and Lucy Emerle.
The musical was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for the 2016 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.
The show (named for the Bechdel family’s funeral home) is rated PG-14 and deals with sexuality and suicide.
A Chicago Tribune review of a January 2025 production called it “one of the best song suites in any contemporary musical, not least because of how well Tesori adapted her colossal talents to a woman’s story rooted in memory both traumatic and elegiac.”
“Fun Home” is based on a graphic novel memoir by Alison Bechdel (who graduated from the same college I did, Oberlin in Ohio, five years before me) and probes many of life’s paradoxes through her recollections, with actresses also playing medium Alison, just going off to college, and small Alison, around 7th grade.
Bechdel grew up in the 1970s in small-town Pennsylvania, the child of Bruce, a closeted, gay English teacher and funeral director who later killed himself (at age 44 in 1980).
“Fun Home” (opening Friday, May 30 at Moline’s Black Box Theatre) features (clockwise from top left) Sydney Richardson as adult Alison, Tatum Kilburg as medium Alison and Lucy Emerle as small Alison.
“The show is about many things: the strangeness, alienation and dark sense of humor that flows from growing up so close to death; the way the moment of our birth dictates our ability to be, or not be, ourselves; the central place our parents and our happy/sad childhoods occupy in our adult memories,” Tribune critic Chris Jones wrote.
“Lisa Kron’s book of the musical is a magnificent achievement, not least for how well it universalizes Alison’s story by breaking her up into three personas, played by separate actors. ‘Fun Home’ is hardly the first memory-based musical but it is uncommonly well-crafted in terms of its distinguishing between time and place, objective events and subjective memory,” Jones wrote.
The Black Box production features Sydney Richardson as adult Alison, Tatum Kilburg as medium Alison and Lucy Emerle as small Alison, Tristan Tapscott as Bruce (her father), Kat Jecklin as Helen (her mother), Topher Elliot, Jack Carslake and Brighton Greim (alternating as John), Kylah Garis as Christian, and Jacqueline Isaacson as Joan (Alison’s college-age girlfriend).
Bradley Robert Jensen is the show’s director and costume designer. Cindy Ramos is music director, Lora Adams (Black-Box co-founder) did set design, with set construction by Michael Kopriva and Emma Wahlmann is the show’s stage manager. Additionally, a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Youth Employment has made it possible to hire two interns, Briley Larson and Eden Myers, to expand their theatre skills.
Jensen has identified most with medium Alison specifically as he was on a journey with self-acceptance of his queerness as well.
Tristan Tapscott plays Bruce, Lucy Emerle is small Alison and Sydney Richardson is adult Alison in “Fun Home.”
His favorite line of the show is: “My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist.”
“The two main characters came from the same place, but the difference of twenty years and Alison’s ability to shake off the emotional chains that held Bruce down allowed her to live fully while they pulled Bruce down,” Jensen said.
The director’s favorite song is the climactic “Edges of the World,” sung by Bruce before he steps in front of the oncoming truck that kills him, “…because it does a great job showing Bruce’s internal struggle in both a lyrical and musical masterpiece (and Tristan sounds INCREDIBLE in rehearsal),” Jensen said.
The Black Box show runs May 30 to June 14; tickets are $18 and available at theblackboxtheatre.com or at the door.
