Fun Home: The Musical

My ideal musical wouldn't have any songs and would allow me to watch it from my house while reading a book, so just possibly my thoughts on Fun Home: The Musical are irrelevant. I liked it. I loved seeing an honest portrayal of dyke life from childhood to adulthood, adapted by former Five Lesbian Brother Lisa Kron. And one song, "Changing My Major," is perfection: tuneful, witty, necessary, and it actually furthers the story. Its first two lines, sung by a college girl who has just had her first, long-delayed lesbian experience, are, "I'm changing my major to Joan. I'm changing my major to Sex with Joan." Two other songs are also great, one from a child's perspective of really seeing a butch for the first time and the other culminating with the suicide. The tricky, near impossible, task of translating Alison Bechdel's brilliant, genre-busting memoir Fun Home to stage is admirably handled, though I would have liked much more of the adult Alison and fewer pointless, "adorable" kid songs (an unending fake commercial for the Bechdel funeral home and an imitation Partridge Family jam) designed purely to halt the action and delight the easily fooled audience, which they did. I was shocked that Proust, who is so central to the book, has vanished from the musical (despite the sublime potential of these rhymes: boost, roost, goosed...) The self-confessed theatergoer who went with me liked the show very much, though he thought some of the music was "derivative of Sondheim" and he wanted to see lots of Bechdel drawings all night instead of just one, at the close.

In one regard, the show suffers from same cautious syndrome that afflicted Behind the Candelabra: in both, the middle-aged man's teen male lover is played by someone way too old. Here, seventeen-year old Roy is played by hot, muscular Joel (jo-EL) Perez who looks thirty and is actually twenty-seven. This dishonest change flattens a story that is already about the blurred lines between youth and adulthood and diminishes its complexity.

Much more useful to you: The NYT superloved it. Now through November 17 at the Public. See it.

(photo by Joan Marcus via)