You have to hand it to the creators of the ground-breaking Broadway musical Fun Home. If ever there was a musical that shouldn't have worked, it would have been one based upon lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel's award-winning 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
But to my pleasant surprise, the stage version of Fun Home more than met my high expectations when I saw it on Broadway not long after it won five well-earned Tony Awards including Best Musical in 2015. Now, Chicago audiences will get a chance to see the melodic and theatrical brilliance of Fun Home for themselves courtesy of a reconfigured national tour playing at the Oriental Theatre through Sunday, Nov. 13.
I was an instant fan of Bechdel's revealing memoir about her own coming-out process and uncovering the painful truth of her closeted bisexual father's contradictory life and likely suicide. It helped that I was already a voracious follower of Bechdel's syndicated lesbian comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran in several LGBTQ newspapers like Windy City Times until 2008.
So I was very apprehensive when I read a 2012 item in The New York Times about Fun Home being transformed into a musical by out playwright Lisa Kron ( Well, The Secretaries ) and composer Jeanine Tesori ( Shrek The Musical, Caroline, Or Change ). My first thought was: "How in the world are they going to make that work?"
Fun Home is a very personal-is-political piece of history that documents the amazing shifts in attitude and acceptance of lesbians and gay men in America. It's also very notable for its non-linear and intensely introspective storytelling which is intelligently and densely packed with so many references to great 20th-century literature. It's this latter aspect that probably explains in part why Fun Home is increasingly being taught as part of college curricula beyond the expected ghetto of gender studies.
In adapting Fun Home into a 90-minute intermission-less musical, Kron and Tesori carried through with the book's non-linear structure. Yet they also came up with the brilliant dramatic framing device of having Bechdel herself looking back on her life while illustrating the panels that make up Fun Home. In a casting coup, former Miss America and Northwestern University alumna Kate Shindle plays the grown Alison on tour.
Fun Home the musical also features two other actresses portraying Bechdel as a child ( Alessandra Baldacchino as "Small Alison" ) and a as a college student ( Abby Corrigan as "Medium Alison" ). The shifts in Alison's time periods provides for a very eclectic score with folk and pop-influenced songs that ape the sounds of the Jackson Five and The Partridge Family.
Kron and Tesori also crucially flesh out Bechdel's parents. Bechdel's mother, Helen ( played by Chicago actress Susan Moniz ), is given a heartbreaking song near the end called "Days and Days," while the father, Bruce ( former Chicago actor Robert Petkoff ), isn't quite made out to be the controlling malevolent force he often is in the book.
When asked about her own reaction to the musical, Bechdel has been full of nothing but praise when quoted.
"I find myself a little bit envious of what musical theater can do. It's a very emotional medium," said Bechdel following a keynote presentation of a 2015 Queers & Comics conference in New York. "I've watched both of my brothers, like, crying at this play when they didn't cry when they read my book."
Fun Home also has the distinction of being the first Broadway musical to put a lesbian front and center as its central protagonist. Previously in Broadway musicals like Falsettos, Rent and If/Then, lesbians were just supporting characters.
Fun Home also broke barriers for Kron and Tesori as the first all-female writing team to win Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score of a musical. Unfortunately, Kron and Tesori's wins and full speeches were not seen on network TV because CBS opted not to feature the musical writing categories on the Tony Awards broadcast that year.
When it played on Broadway, Fun Home was seen in a theater-in-the-round staging at the intimate Circle in the Square Theatre. But for the national tour, Tony Award-winning director Sam Gold has re-staged Fun Home to fit into the many massive proscenium arch theaters across North America.
So LGBTQ theater fans and their allies have much to celebrate now that Fun Home is going to have a wider audience across the country. Who knows? Maybe some day Fun Home might be adapted into an animated film in the same way that the graphic novel Persepolis made the leap to the big screen in 2007.
"I'm very happy that young lesbians had Dykes to Watch Out For and didn't have to read The Well of Loneliness like I did," said Bechdel when asked about her influential legacy in depicting LGBTQ life in comics and graphic novels like Are You My Mother? and Fun Home. "I'm being a little glib, but it's a weird honor and great responsibility."
The national tour of Fun Home continues through Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St. Tickets are $22-$95; call 800-775-2000 or visit BroadwayInChicago.com .
