Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Fun Home, the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel won five TOny Wards on Saundya, including Best Musical, capping a road of critical triumph for the show. IN addition to Best Musical, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron won Best Original Score, Kron won for Best Book of a Musical, Sam Gold won for Best Direction of a Musical, and Michael Cerveris won for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical.
I was lucky enough to see the show in its opening week and it was an extraordinary night of theater, with three actors portraying Bechdel at various points in her life, Beth Malone Emily Skeggs and Sydney Lucas.
The above photo from the Times shows Bechdel ‘s emotion at the winning moment. Congrats to her for turning her family history into a story that has touched so many people in two mediums.
The Tony Awards nominations are out today, honoring the best on Broadway, and Fun Home tied for most nominations with 12 (An American in Paris also got 12.) The musical, based on the Alison Bechdel graphic novel, was nominated for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Book, Best Director, Best Actor in a Musical (Michael Cerveris), Best Actress in a Musical (Beth Malone), three in the Best Featured Actress category ( Judy Kuhn, Sydney Lucas and Emily Skeggs,) Best Scenic Design, Best Lighting Design and Best Orchestration.
I was lucky enough to see this last week, and its deserving of every honor it gets, a truly mesmerizing and heartbreaking night of theater. If I had to pick one performance to call out it would be 12 year old Sydney Lucas, who is simply astonishing as Small Allison. Alison Bechdel’s memoir about her family life, family secrets, coming out and dealing with the past has achieved a cultural significance that no graphic novel save Maus has ever come close to.
Bechdel drew a brief but powerful coda to the Fun Home experience as a webcomic for Vulture.
And the NY Times profiles her and the strange experience of seeing your life turned into a musical::
“She is a curious human being, and she’s curious about herself most of all,” Ms. Malone said of Ms. Bechdel. “Even her look is all about telling the truth — no ornamentation, nothing pretty. She hates lies — lies and embellishments are what got her dad killed.”
Ms. Bechdel has no formal role in creating the musical, but checks in often, answers questions by email and offers the periodic note. She asked them to change one sentence, to make clear that her father, a fastidious home restorer and antiques collector, had used real William Morris wallpaper, and not an imitation.
Photo ©2015 Joan Marcus
Fun Home opened on Broadway last night and the musical based on Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic novel won rave reviews. The show stars Beth Malone, Emily Skeggs and Sydney Lucas (above) as Bechdel at various ages, and Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Oscar Williams as the rest of the Bechdel family.
A sampling:
Ben Brantley in the NY Times:
“Fun Home” knows where you live. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway. Yet this impeccably shaded portrait of a girl and her father, which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter.
Choose from the most used tags
Variety:
New! Fresh! Original! We toss those kudos around a lot in this business. (It’s like calling everyone “darling.”) But “Fun Home” really earns the praise. Lisa Kron, who wrote both book and lyrics, assembles words and images in unexpected ways to dramatize the bittersweet memoir (based on the 2006 graphic novel by Alison Bechdel) of a grown woman remembering the troubled father she loved in spite of himself. Sam Gold’s direction brings lucidity to the complex mechanics of staging a story that takes place in three time frames. And Jeanine Tesori’s haunting music doesn’t sound a bit like anyone else’s music.
….and so on and so forth. These kind of reviews should give the musical a kickstart, and it should be interesting to see if it runs longer than Spider-Man. I’m seeing it later this week myself and hope to have a few words.
If you want more reviews here’s Elizabeth Vincentelli in the NY Post.
The Hollywood Reporter:
Daily News
I know I was supposed to be watching the Super Bowl, gauging the plumpedness of those laced-up game balls, but I, beneath my furry blanket on the long stretch of the couch, could not take my eyes from Roz Chast's bestselling, award-winning graphic memoir,
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?Like
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Chast's illustrated story of her parents' later years is devastating and also beautiful and finally heart crunching. An only child of two people who have lived inseparably for years, Chast finds herself challenged by the encroachment of their needs and by the intensifying quirks of her parents' respective personalities. The domineering, almost bullying mother. The talks-too-much-and-can't-fix-a-thing-and-has-a-holy-soul father. They live in a four-room Brooklyn apartment crowded by lifelong detritus. They live increasingly afraid of stepping outside. They rely on Roz, but Roz is hardly enough. And when they finally agree to move into an expensive assisted-living facility, things don't get a whole lot easier.
But like
Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure, the memoir we'll be unpacking in tomorrow's English 135 at Penn, Chast doesn't allow her confusion to rise to clanging bitterness. Doesn't allow her own disappointment, weariness, frustration, beleaguered condition to transmute into hateful spite. Doesn't tell her story to trump or exploit. She is just telling it as it was—the good she can remember, the empathy she feels, the anger that flashes, the hurt places in between the loved places, the ambiguity she will always feel about her mother and the love she'll always feel for her dad.
It's not a tirade, in other words. It's an archeological dig.
It's here, it's gorgeous, it proves (again, like
Edward Hirsch's Gabriel proves, again) how many different ways there are to tell the stories of our lives.
The Pulitzer Prize nominated musical version of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is coming to Broadway near year and the cast and crew have been announced. Michael Cerveris will be reprising his role as Bruce Bechdel, Alison’s closeted father.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a press preview event yesterday at which Bechdel, composer Jeanine Tesori, lyricist Lisa Kron and director Sam Gold talked about the show and were interviewed by actress Cherry Jones. Sydney Lucas who plays the young version of Alison also sang the song “Ring of Keys” which is based on the scene in the graphic novel where she sees a female delivery person and feels a heretofore unknown but thrilling kinship with her. It was quite a moving performance and surely will be a showstopper. (I didn’t see the original production alas.)
The show is being moved to the Circle in the Square theater where it will be staged in the round. Sounds pretty ground breaking in many ways, and it will definitely get a LOT of attention for a book that was already incredibly ground breaking.
Apropos of nothing, while I was fact checking (yes I do that) this post, I discovered that Alison Bechdel is a black belt in karate. Now you know.
The Broadway channel on Sirius satellite has been playing the FUN HOME soundtrack a lot, and the score is great. Telephone Wire is one of the best show songs I’ve heard in years! Congrats to the show, and the Tony Awards in general–very entertaining!
Next up : the Oscar !
Okay, now she totally has to go for the EGOT – with the E being Eisner.