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Broadway’s “Fun Home” is the lesbian-themed musical we’ve been waiting for

Editor’s Note: This story was published when “Fun Home” first debuted, in 2015. It’s a great review, and AfterEllen is headed to see the show for the first time this week during Dallas Pride!

I have loved musicals for as long as I can remember. I’m pretty sure my parents watched movies like Annie with me since the moment my eyes could focus on something, not to mention the fact that all Disney movies are technically musical movies, so I guess that’s where it all started. My earliest stage musical memory is seeing a school production of Li’l Abner. It was a weird experience, for a six-year-old, enjoying a story in a way I was somewhat unfamiliar with, and having it be performed by people I knew, people I saw every day. According to my mother, I leaned over and whispered, “I can do that.” And though it took a few years before I found a community theatre, I did end up being in many a musical in my youth, and loving every minute of it.

While I consider myself a tried-and-true theatre nerd, of the previous queer ladies that are on Broadway, RENT is the only one I’m intimately familiar with. (I missed If/Then‘s run even though I live in NYC because I’m a loser.) Not that there are that many to choose from. As much fun as it is to ship Galinda and Elphaba in Wicked, and even though “We’re Not Done” from Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Bring it On musical is one of the best love songs ever sung between two women not actually in love, there isn’t enough LGBT lady representation on Broadway, plain and simple.

Fun Home the Musical, composed by Jeanine Tesori with book and lyrics by out playwright Lisa Kron, is the representation we’ve been waiting for, and part of what makes that true is that the show as a whole is about so much more than its lesbian main character. Fun Home takes you on one woman’s journey; her conflicted childhood, her complicated relationship with her family, her journey of self-discovery. She just happens to be a lesbian, just like her dad happened to keep their house looking like museum, just like her family happens to own a funeral home. All just pieces of the puzzle, threads in the tapestry.

Fun Home, at its core, is a musical about a family; Alison, of course, her brothers, (Zell Steele Morrow and Oscar Williams), her mother (Judy Kuhn), and her father Bruce (Michael Cerveris), a high school English teacher and funeral home owner, who refurbishes and curates old houses and keeps handsome young men on hand (Joel Perez x 3). It’s about this family, picture-perfect on the outside but decaying on the inside, not unlike Bruce’s funeral home customers. It’s about them all trying to relate to each other, try to live with secrets and differences, and trying to find themselves and each other in their small pocket of Pennsylvania.

Now, for people who only dabble in musical theatre, I have to warn you: This isn’t Mamma Mia, or Jersey Boys, or Rock of Ages. All fun musicals, but none totally original. All of them are what they call jukebox musicals: stories based around existing songs, instead of songs created for a story. It’s a subtle difference, I suppose, but a difference nonetheless.

If I had to compare it to another musical, it would be Next to Normal. One of my favorites, especially of musicals to come out in the past 10 years, Next to Normal is dark and complex and real. While shows like Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera aren’t exactly sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, they have more of a classically tragic feel to them. Next to Normal and Fun Home share a familial sense of drama and sadness, a more approachable kind of tragedy than the French revolution or getting kidnapped and trained for the opera by someone who may or may not be the ghost of your dead father.

For a musical with dark undertones, Fun Home is never self-pitying or overly dramatic. It’s not tragic for tragedy’s sake. In fact, the Big Tragedy in the show is mentioned long before it happens on stage. Because Fun Home (much like the graphic memoir it was based on) is non-linear, and the life of Alison Bechdel is portrayed by three versions of her: Small Alison, Medium Alison, and Alison, the narrator of the show (brilliantly executed by Syndey Lucas, Emily Skeggs and Beth Malone, respectively). The show is told with the familiarity of your best friend telling you about her life, not shying away from analyzing the hardest things she experienced, but including plenty of good stuff too. The show is definitely a story about Alison and how she related (or didn’t) to her family. But part of it was her figuring out who she was. Before she was the name associated with the Bechdel Test, before she drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel was just a little girl who hated wearing dresses. One of the most poignant songs of the show is called “Ring of Keys,” performed by Sydney Lucas, the insanely talented tiny human who plays Small Alison, in which Alison sees an “old-school butch” for the first time, and realizes she’s in the same room as someone who looks on the outside how she feels on the inside.

I remember the first time I saw two girls kissing in real life. I was young, probably 8 or 9, and I was in the airport with my family. The young woman who sat next to me on the airplane had short hair and spikes sticking out of her nose that were so foreign-looking to me, I couldn’t figure out if it was a nose ring or if she had gelled her nose-hairs down. She watched a movie on the flight and laughed louder than I had ever heard a person in a public place laugh. As far as I could tell, she was fearless, and it scared me a little. When we got off the plane, I was telling my parents all this I had experienced, pointing this strange woman out in the crowd of passengers waiting around baggage claim. Then another young woman ran up, pigtails and overalls, and leapt into my plane-neighbor’s arms. The two women kissed and I felt all of my internal organs do a 360.

I stopped mid-sentence, and whether my mother said it first (likely) or not, I said “ew” out loud, but kept a watchful eye on the two of them for as long as I could. I remember feeling a weird sense of guilt about saying it was gross, even though I was sure it was how I was supposed to feel. But before that moment, “lesbian” was just a word people in my small sphere of experience used to describe “masculine” women. I had never thought beyond that to what it meant that a lesbian would be in a relationship with another woman. And seeing them kiss in that airport, with more genuine passion and love for each other than I had ever seen anyone exchange in my entire life, kind of blew my worldview to pieces right there in the airport. And while my experience wasn’t shot-for-shot the same as Alison’s, “Ring of Keys” still brought me back to exactly that moment, and precisely that feeling.

Small Alison sees a woman dressed in men’s clothes and with swagger for days, and suddenly feels validated, thinks maybe she’s not alone in the way she feels, this self-expression she hasn’t yet been able to verbalize. In the midst of the song “Ring of Keys,” Small Alison asks a question I think a lot of closeted women have asked when they saw a confident lesbian strutting about: “Do you feel my heart saying hi?” Almost like you hope they’ll look at you and somehow just know and tell you it’s okay.

Medium Alison also has an “ah ha!” moment most young lady-loving ladies go through, when she starts to come into her own, and meets Joan, a girl she met at the Gay Union, in the song “Changing My Major.” It’s classically Broadway in that it’s catchy and lyrical and pleasing to the ear, and performed by Emily Skeggs, who is making her Broadway debut but could have fooled me into thinking she was a seasoned vet. What makes it new and unique is that it’s about a young woman’s first sexual experience with another woman. By the end of the song, I was ready to petition for “changing my major” to be the new “U-Hauling”. I wouldn’t know where to file this show if you asked me to, honestly. It’s not a comedy, but it’s hilarious. It’s not a tragedy, but it’s desperately sad. All I know for sure is that it’s entirely unique, and indescribable.

I think the song “Come to the Fun Home” is the best metaphor for the show as a whole. In this number, the three Bechdel children sing an upbeat, cheerful tune; a commercial they made for the family business. Adorable right? Well, when you remember the family business is a funeral home, it veers slightly away from adorable, while never losing sight of it. But you can’t help but smile and laugh while these extremely talented children jump and wiggle while singing lines like “You’ve got to bury your mama, but you don’t know where to go,” and “We take dead bodies every day of the week,” to a Jackson 5-esque tune. It seems morbid for children to know so much about formaldehyde and aneurysm hooks, but to the kids, this was normal. It’s their life, it’s all they know. So sure, Alison’s story could have been morbid, but it’s not, at least not overly so; it’s just her story.

The cast, as a whole, is absolutely amazing, from those making their Broadway debut like Roberta Colindrez (Girls) to Judy Kuhn, (who I grew up listening to on the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Les Mis…and the Pocahontas soundtrack) who has been on Broadway for decades, everyone gelled well together and sounded fantastic throughout the performance. And while I usually like intermissions (because there’s that moment of “Oh no, is it over?!” followed immediately by, “Oh thank goodness it’s only halfway through”) there’s something to be said for spending 100 uninterrupted minutes completely immersed in someone else’s world.

Fun Home is not a huge, flashy show with fancy costumes and elaborate set changes and big group sings. In fact, the entire ensemble is nine people, and there’s not really much dancing at all. (The sets are actually quite stunning, it’s just not a rotating barricade, you know?) If that’s what you’re looking for, try Anything Goes or Wicked. But if you’re looking for a show that makes you think and feel, with songs that will stick with you long after you leave the theatre, go see Fun Home, this special, unique musical, because what it lacks in tap dancing, it makes up for in heart.

In case you don’t want to take my word for it, so far Fun Home has been met with really great reviews, including official writeups and tweets from Broadway legends themselves.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to listen to soundtracks before you see a show, the whole Original Cast Recording is on Spotify, but if you’re not, Fun Home is officially open in New York City, at the Circle in the Square theatre, so hop to it! And let me know what you think!

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