Trace the History of Fun Home, From Graphic Memoir to Moving Broadway Musical

The storyline of Fun Home doesn’t scream (or even whisper) “Broadway musical,” but that’s exactly what makes the show is such a thrilling surprise. This coming-of-age tale centers on a young lesbian whose closeted father pursues inappropriate relationships with boys in his high school English class. He also owns the local funeral home, where his kids do odd jobs and play among the caskets. The sum of these unusual parts, based on cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, opens on April 19 at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre after an acclaimed debut at the Public Theater. Read on to learn more about this moving family saga.


Secrets and Lies
As a child in rural Pennsylvania, Alison Bechdel kept a journal about growing up with a controlling, perfectionist dad and quietly unhappy mom. Bruce Bechdel fought his daughter’s tomboyish tendencies and micromanaged her burgeoning talent as an artist, but the only thing he really loved was the family’s 19th-century Gothic Revival house. By the time Alison entered Oberlin College in 1979, she realized she was a lesbian. When she called her parents to share the news, her mother blurted a shocking response: Dad is gay, too. Bruce sent a cryptic letter expressing envy of “the ‘new’ freedom” on college campuses. “In the fifties, it was not even considered an option.” Four months later, he stepped into the path of an oncoming truck.


A Life in Pictures
Struggling make sense of her peculiar background, Bechdel became “a careful archivist of her own life,” according to an author bio. She launched the syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1983 and, in 2006, published Fun Home, subtitled A Family Tragicomic. The book’s 232 pages of meticulously observed drawings and captions present a lifetime of love, sadness and missed connections, “a masterpiece,” according to Time, “about two people who live in the same house but different worlds.” Bechdel examined the other side of her heritage six years later in Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama? In 2014, she received a $650,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.


Page to Stage
Among Fun Home’s many early fans was actress/playwright Lisa Kron, who, like Alison Bechdel, transformed her quirky family history into art in plays such as Well and 2.5 Minute Ride. Although she had no experience writing librettos, Kron pictured Fun Home as a musical, and she passed the book to four-time Tony-nominated composer Jeanine Tesori, who quickly agreed. For the next five years, Kron and Tesori developed the show (including a residency at the Sundance Theater Lab), struggling to translate the thoughts and actions of a cartoonist and her troubled family to the stage. In the end, they decided to present Alison at three ages, a conceit Tesori had previously toyed with in Shrek and Violet.


Welcome to Our House
“Fun Home is a memory play, and the mechanics of how the memories behave has changed several times,” actress Beth Malone wrote in a 2013 essay for Broadway.com. As the adult narrator through multiple workshops, Malone recalled, “I’ve had about five opening numbers and an entire library of speeches and deleted scenes.” Raul Esparza and David Aaron Baker played Bruce in early presentations, followed by Tony winner Michael Cerveris. “Before I got involved, [director] Sam [Gold], Jeanine and Lisa went through a lot of versions involving projections and images from the graphic novel, but at some point, they realized that trying to re-create the book on stage was not going to work,” Cerveris told Broadway.com. “The process became figuring out the theatrical equivalent of the book.”


Family Dynamics
By the time Fun Home officially opened at the Public Theater on October 22, 2013, Gold had attracted an outstanding cast led by Malone, Cerveris, three-time Tony nominee Judy Kuhn as matriarch Helen Bechdel, Alexandra Socha (who left before the end of the run, replaced by Emily Skeggs) as teenage “Medium Alison” and 10-year-old powerhouse Sydney Lucas as “Small Alison.” Critics were ecstatic, praising the show’s beautiful, character-driven score and script, Gold’s expert staging and the actors’ sensitive performances. An original cast album was released in February 2014, and the show won five Best Musical prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.


At Home on Broadway
Theater message boards buzzed for months with rumors about where and when Fun Home would transfer to Broadway. The show’s producers chose to wait more than year, and Gold made the bold decision to restage his work in the round at Circle in the Square. (Fortunately Sydney Lucas, who sings in seven production numbers and garnered rave reviews, did not outgrow her role.) Reflecting on the appeal of Fun Home, Judy Kuhn told Broadway.com, “It tells a profound story that everybody can relate to because we all come from families that are functional and dysfunctional—it’s really about love and forgiveness. It is not like anything I’ve ever seen or been in, and I think the world is ripe for this story and the way it’s being told.”