NUOVA Vocal Arts · 2026/27 Arts Season
Fun Home
A daughter looks back through the fragments of her childhood, searching memory for a way to understand her father—and herself.
The Story
About the Show
Moving between Alison’s childhood, her university years and her adult life, Fun Home reveals a family held together by affection, secrecy and the stories its members tell themselves. What emerges is at once deeply personal and universally recognizable: a daughter’s attempt to see her parents clearly—and, in doing so, better understand herself.
Winner of five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Fun Home is a compassionate and profoundly moving theatrical memoir, alive with humour, discovery and an unforgettable contemporary score.
Recommended for mature audiences.
From the Director
Director’s Note
Benjamin Smith
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Fun Home has been one of my favourite musicals for over a decade, and a piece I have wanted to stage for nearly as long.
What has always moved me is the way it holds contradiction: love and damage, tenderness and shame, humour and grief, all existing at once. It understands something profound about memory, and about the difficult work of understanding the people who made us.
When Fun Home opened on Broadway in 2015, it became the first Broadway musical to centre a lesbian protagonist. A decade later, that history feels worth remembering. We are living through a moment in which questions about whose stories young people encounter, and which lives are given space in public culture, feel newly urgent. Art has always been sensitive to those shifts. When the boundaries around what may be seen, read, or represented begin to move, artists have a responsibility to notice, and to keep making room for humanity.
That is what Fun Home offers so beautifully. No easy answers, but a family: specific, funny, loving, difficult and completely human.
For this production, we began with a blank page: a space where the past can be drawn, erased, rearranged and summoned again. Where Alison can stand beside the child she was and the father she is still trying to know.
Perhaps we all do some version of this. We return to the people who shaped us. We ask new questions of old memories. We notice what we could not see before.
Maybe that is one of the gifts of looking back: not that the past becomes simpler, but that we become capable of holding more of it.
Thank you for joining us in that act of remembering, and for supporting NUOVA and the remarkable artists who have brought this story to life.
Benjamin Smith
The Company
Meet the Cast
Meet the artists bringing Alison Bechdel’s singular family story to the Westbury stage.
Alison
Jaimi Reese
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Medium Alison
Julie Koebel
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Small Alison
Aislyn Burdek
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Bruce
Doug Mertz*
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Helen
Kim Mattice Wanat*
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Joan
Kijo Gatama
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Christian
Cooper Nash Rajotte
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John
Sasha Bayduza
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Bobby Jeremy / Mark
Sable B. Boltz
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Pete / Roy
David Son
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Behind the Production
Creative Team
Director
Benjamin Smith
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Benjamin Smith (he/him) is a director, theatre educator, and arts leader from Fredericton, New Brunswick / Wəlastəkwewiyik. He holds an MFA in Directing from the University of Alberta and has trained with the Academy of Fight Directors Canada and Theatrical Intimacy Educators (TIE). Ben is currently Associate Artistic Director of NUOVA Vocal Arts and teaches in the Musical Theatre Performance program at MacEwan University. A newly minted uncle to baby Weslie, Ben is endlessly grateful for the friends and family cheering him on from Atlantic Canada, and especially for his partner, Dasha, whose love and support make all of this possible.
Music Director
Simon Abbott
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Simon Abbott is a left-handed organist, jazz pianist, director, and composer living in Edmonton.
He is the musical director of over 50 shows, most recently A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and Rocky Horror at Grindstone Theatre, The Greatest Showgirl and Romeo and Juliette’s Notebook at Spotlight Cabaret, The Prom at MacEwan, Marat-Sade at the University of Alberta, and White Christmas and Anne of Green Gables at Nuova.
He feels the extremes of pride and shame for the musicals he has written: Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer and Die Harsh with Byron Martin, Morningside Road with Mhairi Berg, and the Accidental Beach trilogy with members of The 11 O’Clock Number.
His involvement in LGBTQ+ advocacy grew out of his work with homeless and at-risk youth at Phoenix Youth Programs in Halifax. He joined the Don’t Be Afraid movement and was a singer and arranger for their outreach choir VOX (a member of their board first leant him a copy of Fun Home). After careful examination, Simon is happy to report his day-to-day life does indeed pass the Bechdel test.
Book & Lyrics
Lisa Kron
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Lisa Kron is a playwright and actor whose plays include Well, In the Wake and 2.5 Minute Ride. She wrote the book and lyrics for Fun Home with composer Jeanine Tesori. Their musical won five 2015 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Kron is a founding member of the Five Lesbian Brothers and serves on the Dramatists Guild of America council.
Photo: Huntington Theatre Company.
Based on the Graphic Novel
Alison Bechdel
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Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist and author best known for the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and the graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into this musical. Her other memoirs include Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate and The New York Times Book Review; she is a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow.
Photo: Yale University.
Music
Jeanine Tesori
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Jeanine Tesori is a composer of musical theatre, opera and film whose musicals include Fun Home, Kimberly Akimbo, Caroline, or Change, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Violet and Shrek the Musical. She is a two-time Tony Award recipient and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. With Lisa Kron, she became the first all-woman team to win the Tony for Best Score of a Musical for Fun Home.
Photo: Yale University.
Lighting Designer
Ken Matthews
The Musicians
Meet the Band
Violin
Svetlana Remniakova
Drums
Ben Caufield
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Ben Caufield is a drummer, composer, and recording engineer based out of Edmonton. He plays a variety of styles moving from modern jazz to post-hardcore, influenced by the likes of Avishai Cohen, Tarek Yamani, Basement, and Title Fight. A fit for the performance major at MacEwan University, he graduated having had the chance to perform and study abroad in Helsinki, Finland, studying with the legendary Finnish drummer Tommi Rautiainen. Beyond playing, Ben works as an aspiring recording engineer locally, having recorded at Riverdale Recorders, Cold Weather Studios, and Wolf Willow Studios.
Bass
Marshall Hughes
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Marshall Hughes is a bassist based out of Edmonton, Alberta. He plays a variety of styles ranging from jazz to funk, to post-grunge rock, influenced by Joe Dart, Paul Chambers, Verdine White, and Flea. He is currently wrapping up his final year of the Performance Major at MacEwan University after travelling to Helsinki, Finland to study with renowned bassists Hannu Rantanen and Marko Liski.
Band
Cindy Richardson
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Cindy has enjoyed music from a very young age, starting with the piano. She played clarinet and saxophone throughout junior and senior high school, as well as college. Cindy is a school teacher by profession, with much of her teaching experience having been in music and concert band. She started a home school band program in central Alberta, over 20 years ago, which is still going strong. Cindy has been involved in the local music community for many years, including playing cello with a small string group, conducting a community band, teaching clarinet clinics, and conducting the musical theatre production of Chicago. In 2017, she dusted off her clarinet and earned a seat in the Concordia Symphony Orchestra which has since morphed into the Capital City Symphony. Cindy’s first gig in musical theatre was the 2025 Grindstone Theatre production of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.
With Our Thanks
Partners & Sponsors
Presenting Partner
Fringe Theatre
From Our Arts Community
Around the City
Plan Your Visit
Tickets & Passes
Individual tickets are sold through Fringe Theatre. Fun Home is also included in NUOVA’s 2026/27 season passes.
3-Show Pass · $120
Fun Home + White Christmas + Oliver!
4-Show Pass · $150
The Arts Season plus your choice of one 2027 Summer Festival Mainstage production.
Complete Season · $170
All three 2026/27 Arts Season productions plus both 2027 Summer Festival Mainstage productions.
FUN HOME is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals. www.concordtheatricals.com.