Uptown Players delivers big with ‘Fun Home’ opening and season announcement
RICH LOPEZ | Staff Writer
richlopezwrites@gmail.com
Well, if it wasn’t for COVID-19, Dallas audiences would have experienced Uptown Players’ Fun Home last year. The cast and crew were about to start rehearsals when, basically, the world shut down. Despite that mess, today’s opening of the Tony Award-winning musical seems like perfect timing.
“Back then we thought, ‘We’ll be back in two weeks, then two months,” Director Cheryl Denson said by phone. “We were ready to go, but now, we are excited and a little bit anxious.”
The majority of actors originally cast for the show have remained save one. But last year’s children had grown out of their characters. The cast includes Duke Anderson, Leslie Collins, Michael Diego Alonzo, Hunter Hall, Jennifer Kuenzer, Max Rudelman, Summer Stern, Emily Truelove and Ashlie Whitworth.
To get the show done, they’ve all proceeded with caution.
“Everyone wants to do this show so we have all been extraordinarily careful. And that’s all of us — the actors, the musicians, the technicians. This is a collaborative art, and we’re a damned army,” she said.
Fun Home is based on Alison Bechdel’s biographical graphic novel of the same name. In that, she wrote about her own coming out process as well as her father’s. While a musical, the story is no Rodgers and Hammerstein. The family in the show is a bundle of emotions that Denson said everyone — especially queer folks — will relate to.
“I don’t think everyone will say, ‘That’s like my family,’ but there are some close qualities that I think everyone will find a place that makes them think, ‘Yeah, that was me.’”
For Denson, this show was a must for her to direct. She had seen it in New York, and, upon her return, she pretty much declared she would do it if Uptown Players were to ever produce it — and here they are.
“I wanted desperately as a gay woman to tell my story,” Denson said. “That’s the fabulous thing about theater — that we get to watch our stories told.”
As it looks, Uptown Players is on an upward stride. Fun Home follows up the Players’ successful comeback to the stage of When Pigs Fly earlier this summer (which is featured on this week’s Dallas Voice cover). Despite, or in accordance with, COVID-19 protocols, the company pulled off its return.
Today, Uptown Players announces its new season for 2022 at its Kalita Humphreys home. Albeit a shortened season, upcoming shows include a Tony-winning musical, two Tony-nominated plays and an old favorite.
