About the work
Fun Home is a musical with music by Jeanine Tesori and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the autobiographical graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. Following its 2013 Off-Broadway premiere, the Broadway production won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. As the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist and the first winning show written by an all-female writing team, it marked a historic turning point in American music theatre.
Plot
The cartoonist Alison, now an adult woman, looks back on her life and tries to put her memories on paper. In flashbacks she encounters herself as a child in the family-run funeral home – affectionately called the "fun home" by the siblings – and as a student discovering her own homosexuality. At the centre is her father Bruce: an art-loving, controlling English teacher and restorer who conceals his own homosexuality all his life. As Alison embraces her identity, memory circles around the never-spoken truth between father and daughter – and around his early, mysterious death.
Cultural significance
Fun Home is regarded as a milestone for queer visibility on the musical stage and as proof that intimate, literary material can carry large-scale music theatre. Tesori's sensitive score and Kron's precise lyrics created numbers such as the moving "Ring of Keys", in which the child first recognises someone who is like herself, and the ballad "Days and Days". The show lastingly broadened the thematic range of Broadway and became a much-awarded critical and audience success.