Fun Home revival braids Bechdel memoir's joy and trauma
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- Sarah Frankcom directs a fluid in-the-round revival of Fun Home, the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir, first seen in the UK in 2018
- Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music) structure the show as a layered reckoning in which three Bechdels — ages 43 (Jodie McNee), student (Alice Audrey O'Hanlon) and child (Felicity Moore) — each reflect on her father's hidden gay life
- Nigel Harman plays the father as alternately charming, narcissistic and brutal; the reviewer compares the family's inability to truly see one another to Long Day's Journey into Night
- The production's central tragedy — Bechdel's father killed himself — is described as made more troubling by being inexplicable, with the cause kept irresolvably out of reach
- The show pairs that darkness with brightness: Moore's youngest Bechdel launches into a Jackson 5-style funk number around an empty coffin, O'Hanlon sings of her first sexual encounter in 'Changing My Major,' and the company performs the feelgood pop number 'Raincoat of Love'
- The reviewer concludes the musical is 'full of knotty conflict, queer celebration and a hope born of awkward survival,' backed by performances the critic calls tremendous across the cast
Why it matters: The revival reanimates a 2018 production that uses three actors to play one woman at different ages — a structural choice that forces the audience to watch Bechdel's queer self-discovery as inseparable from her father's closeted life and suicide, a tragedy the show deliberately refuses to resolve.
