Director Paul Daigneault and his team have created an intimate, emotionally satisfying production that highlights the musical’s strengths-its sharply witty book, memorable songs, and heartbreaking characters.īechdel structured her book as a series of memories and musings that loop and circle achronologically around the main events, Bruce’s death and her own coming out.
While this is not Fun Home’s first appearance in Boston (Broadway in Boston brought a touring production here a year ago for a short run), the show’s current incarnation at SpeakEasy Stage is a must-see. It also was the first show built around a lesbian protagonist. Fun Home won the 2015 Tony for best musical and best book of a musical, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was the first show to win for best score whose creators were both women. It took six years for composer Jeanine Tesori (Tony-nominated for Caroline, or Change) and first-time musical book/lyric writer Lisa Kron to turn Bechdel’s rich memoir into a musical, but what they came up with rocked Broadway in multiple ways. Translating this rich literary and visual feast into the form of a musical, though, was not so simple. And her drawings brilliantly animate her memories, down to the smallest detail (a box of Crayola crayons The Rifleman, Yogi Bear, and other TV shows she and her brothers watched, for example). Bechdel’s writing is lyrical, sharply funny, filled with literary allusions and discussions with her father, a high-school English teacher who moonlighted as director of the family-owned funeral home-the “Fun Home” of the title-but whose true love was meticulously restoring their ornate, Gothic-style house. The crux of the tale is the death-a probable suicide-of Bechdel’s father, Bruce, and how it entwined, in her mind, with acknowledging her own homosexuality a few months before his death. That critically acclaimed, bestselling book told-and showed-in searing, honest detail the story of Bechdel’s growing up as the daughter of a closeted gay father and distant mother in a small Pennsylvania town. It made perfect sense for self-described lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel-author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For-to use the form of the graphic novel for her 2006 memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. The three Alisons: Marissa Simeqi, Amy Jo Jackson, and Ellie van Amerongen, in SpeakEasy Stage’s production of “Fun Home.” Photo by Nile Scott Studios.
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