Kron spent decades writing plays about lesbians back when they were practically invisible in popular culture - let alone on Broadway. Tesori's talking to her collaborator, Lisa Kron, a playwright and longtime member of the downtown theater collective the Five Lesbian Brothers. 'I mean, we had songs and songs and songs.' 'Oh my god, we had so many songs about her drawing, remember?' she says. All of the songs - they sing their desires and what's being held back.'įar more challenging Tesori says, was figuring out how to tell Bechdel's story without using her cartoons, which the creative team tried hard to incorporate in earlier versions. 'I knew that it was a singing piece,' she said during an interview in her Manhattan office. 'I didn't know how it was even possible.'īooks Alison Bechdel's Family Life? Tragicomicīut composer Jeanine Tesori, best known for writing the music for Caroline, Or Change and Shrek The Musical immediately responded to the story about an artistic but repressed and unhappy family.

'I thought it was crazy,' she tells NPR about her reaction when the idea was first broached. Bechdel, then a student at Oberlin College, had just come out to her parents as a lesbian - and learned her father was a deeply closeted gay man.īechdel agrees that the book is not exactly the most obvious source material for a musical. It delves into the mystery around her father's suicide, which took place around 1980. The memoir, by Alison Bechdel, takes its title from her family's sardonic nickname for their business - a funeral home.

Fun Home was a bestselling book, then a smash off-Broadway hit at the Public Theater. Then there's Fun Home, based on a graphic novel by a middle-aged lesbian cartoonist that grapples with themes of suicide, shame and familial dysfunction. Phantom of the Opera, for example, or Wicked. Sydney Lucas as Small Alison and Michael Cerveris as her father in the new production of Fun Home.Ī certain kind of book seems practically written to be adapted into a musical.

Alison bechdel musical