Fun Home: The Broadway Musical

 Post by Sarah H

 

When people think of a Broadway musical, they often imagine flashy, sequined costumes and sparkly happy songs. The plot is usually a love story: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, and in the end, boy gets the girl back. This is the backdrop for the schmaltzy music of Gershwin, Irving Berlin, or Rodgers and Hammerstein. The audience anticipates the choruses of beautiful performers joyfully singing and dancing. That is the stereotypical Broadway musical. There have been more recent musicals that have broken that mould. In 1968, the musical Hair shocked Broadway audiences with its depictions of hippy culture, nudity, and anti-war themes, and the songs were like nothing ever heard before on Broadway. More recently, broadway musicals have taken on LGBTQ themes; musicals such as Rent, Kinky Boots, Pricilla, Queen of the Desert, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, to name a few. Fun Home: The Musical is an intimate theatrical experience that doesn't rely on sparkly costumes or big production numbers to make an emotional impact with its audience.

When Alison Bechdel published Fun Home, in 2006, she never imagined her graphic memoir would become a hit Broadway musical. It’s a coming of age story of a young lesbian growing up in a small Pennsylvania town. Alison explores her relationship with an emotionally distant, closeted homosexual father, who is an English teacher, and a part-time funeral director, who (possibly) commits suicide when Alison is 20 years old. It’s not your usual Broadway musical fare. Yet, after a successful run off-broadway, Fun Home opened on Broadway on April 19th, 2015, to rave reviews. Ben Brantley (2015) said in his April 19th, 2015 New York Times review, that “I can’t think of a recent musical — or play, for that matter — that has done a better job at finding theatrical expression for the wayward dynamics of remembering...But most important is the music, a career-high for Ms. Tesori ("Violet." “Caroline, or Change”), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer” (Brantley, 2015, para. 9-10).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/theater/review-fun-home-at-the-circle-in-the-square-theater.html
The long road to Broadway began in 2009 when Bechdel agreed to allow her memoir to be workshopped at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California. Lisa Kron was the writer and lyricist and Jeanine Tesori was the composer. This is the same duo who completes the musical for the off-broadway and broadway productions. Kron and Tesori were already Tony-nominated writers and composers when they undertook to adapt the graphic memoir for the musical stage. Fun Home was then workshopped at the Sundance Theatre Lab in 2012, and the Public Theatre’s Public Lab. Fun Home went through numerous and extensive changes to the story and music during these workshops. Beth Malone (who played Adult Alison) in the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions, said that the workshop script, “doesn't resemble this current play at all" (as cited in Gans, 2014).
https://archive.is/20131104104324/http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131641-Ojai-Playwrights-Conference-Begins-in-CA-Kron-and-Tesori-Pen-New-Musical
Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori spoke of the struggles of writing a musical based on a graphic memoir. The Musical is told from the perspective of Alison, at the age of 43. They decided that the catalyst for Alison telling the story of her relationship with her father is that Alison is now the age that her father was when he committed suicide. Alison is trying to make sense of her world, and she wonders if she and her father are exactly alike, or nothing alike.

Although Bechdel isn’t involved in the creative process of writing and workshopping the musical, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori skillfully incorporate scenes and songs which correlate to many of Alison’s drawing panels in the graphic memoir. Kron and Tesori maintain the emotional truth of her writing in their script and music. When Kron and Tesori write a song for the scene in the memoir in which young Alison sees a butch Lesbian come into a diner when she is with her father, they are able to write a poignant song that sensitively chronicles this important and eyeopening moment in Alison’s life.

Later, a show-stopping ballad is written for Alison’s character, called “Changing My Major.” The song expresses Alison’s inner thoughts after her first sexual experience with her girlfriend, Joan, while in college.

Fun Home played on Broadway at the Circle in the Square Theatre for 12 previews, and 582 regular performances from April 2015- October 2016. A national tour of the show began in October 2016, running until December 2017. In 2018, a London production played at the Old Vic theatre from June until September, and in April and May 2018, Fun Home played in Toronto, Canada.
Fun Home was nominated for 12 Tony Awards in 2016, winning 5 for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, Best Leading Actor in a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical. Fun Home represents an important first in musical theatre because it is the first Broadway Musical to represent a Lesbian as the lead character!

The video below, tells the account of the making of Fun Home into a Broadway Musical, in the words of Alison Bechdel. The video is narrated by the actress who plays Alison in the Broadway production, Beth Malone.

Alison Bechdel (center) with producers and members of the cast and creative team
of Fun Home celebrating the Best Musical win at the 2015 Tony Awards.

Sources Consulted
Bechdel, A. (2006). Fun home: a family tragicomic. New York. Houghton Mifflin.

Brantley, B. (2015, April 20). Review: 'Fun Home' at the Circle in the Square Theater. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/theater/review-fun-home-at-the-circle-in-the-square-theater.html.

Fun Home on Broadway. (n.d.). Fun home's journey to broadway. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qGohb4IxnA&t=8s.

Fun Home Performance Tony Awards 2015. (2015, July 18). Ring of keys. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMAuesRJm1E&list=RDpMAuesRJm1E&start_radio=1.

Gans, A. (2014, October 3). DIVA TALK: Beth Malone On Creating a Fun Home and Becoming an Unsinkable Molly Brown. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20141205162108/http://www.playbill.com/news/article/diva-talk-beth-malone-on-creating-a-fun-home-and-becoming-an-unsinkable-molly-brown-331954/P2.

Hetrick, A. (2013, November 4). Ojai Playwrights Conference Begins in CA; Kron and Tesori Pen New Mus... Retrieved from https://archive.is/20131104104324/http://www.playbill.com/news/article/131641-Ojai-Playwrights-Conference-Begins-in-CA-Kron-and-Tesori-Pen-New-Musical. 

Theo Wargo Getty Images North America. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwiGsITyioPmAhVIIqwKHSxHCnUQMwhPKAcwBw&url=https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-awards-2015-winners-performances-highlights/&psig=AOvVaw1gG-UW_dCCLVvljJ4WZUk9&ust=1574693054274184&ictx=3&uact=3

The Musical Stage Company. (2018, March 6). Changing my major. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZm8jFISeHU.

  Post Created by Sarah H