With new in-the-round staging, Fun Home transferred to Broadway where it began previews at the Circle in the Square Theatre on March 27, 2015, and officially opened on April 19, 2015. It won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical. The off-Broadway production was nominated for 8 Drama Desk Awards and 7 Outer Critics Awards. Writing for The New York Times, Ben Brantley praised Jeanine Tesori’s complex and moving score, and the excellent performances of the cast. The Public Theater production received glowing reviews. The production featured Beth Malone (Alison), Alexandra Socha (Medium Alison), an eight-year old Sydney Lucas (Young Alison), Judy Kuhn (Helen), Michael Cerveris (Bruce), Roberta Colindrez (Joan), Griffin Birney and Noah Hinsdale (Alison’s brothers), and Joel Perez (Roy/Others).

The production was directed by Sam Gold, with scenic and costume design by David Zinn, lighting design by Ben Stanton, and projection design by Jim Findlay and Jeff Snugg. The musical was workshopped at the Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab in the summer of 2013 before performing its world premier at New York’s Public Theater on October 22, 2013. In other firsts, Fun Home later became the first to win a Tony Award for Best Original Score by an all-female writing team. Although earlier musicals, such as Falsettos, RENT, and The Color Purple, feature lesbian protagonists, Fun Home was groundbreaking for its frank explorations of the life of a gay woman. Some sources claim Fun Home was the first mainstream musical to have a lesbian as a main character. Alison Bechdel has been quoted as stating that Tesori and Kron “understood the emotional backbone of the story better than I did.”

The graphic novel/memoir was adapted into a musical by composer Jeanine Tesori and writer Lisa Kron over a 5 year period. New York Times reviewer Sean Wilsey described it as “the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced,” and “A comic book for lovers of words.” Wilsey also noted that the novel succeeded in pushing the boundaries of two genres, comics and memoirs. Based on Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic novel of the same name, Fun Home is an intimate musical in which we are introduced to Alison at three different ages as her adult self sets out to unravel the many mysteries of her childhood.īechdel’s graphic novel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was published in 2006.

A family tragicomic