This is not a person.”Ĭan one new musical overcome years of lazy stereotyping? In the Fun Home preview that I recently attended, no one giggled when young Alison sang “Ring of Keys.” Instead, the song elicited gasps of recognition. It was just like, This character’s a joke.

I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. As a Tony voter, Kron sees every Broadway show, and she has grown weary of a tiresome trope: In several recent musicals, “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. Kron was worried that audiences would laugh at that last song-“I really struggled with finding language to describe that I didn’t feel was a trigger for a straight audience,” she told me. Several of the show’s songs deal directly with Alison’s nascent sexuality, including “Al for Short,” in which young Alison imagines herself as a suave rescuer of damsels in distress “Changing My Major,” when college-aged Alison discovers the joy of sex and “Ring of Keys,” in which 8-year-old Alison admires a butch woman in a diner.* “You feel like you’re entering a traditional story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but once you start to analyze it, you realize that there’s no straightforward story.” “It goes around and around and around,” says Kron. The specific challenges range from the practical-in her cartoons, Bechdel can depict her parents and brothers at many different points in their lives, while the musical has less flexibility with its flesh-and-blood actors-to the literary: The book’s storytelling is very recursive. “You have to make a parallel work that has its own originating impulse.” “You can’t translate one form into another,” says Kron. Fun Home, on the other hand, examines a father-daughter relationship, with Alison as the main protagonist.Īdapting Bechdel’s much-loved 2006 memoir for the theater was a complicated process. They’re about a leading man and an ingénue,” says Kron. “Musicals are traditionally the straightest of the straight, even though they were largely made by gay men. Shows like Billy Elliot have portrayed the inner lives of gay boys, but Fun Home is the first mainstream musical about a young lesbian.

Alison bechdel fun home musical