West End opens its doors to Tony Award-winner Fun Home

FUN HOME, which won the Tony Award for best musical two years ago, will open at the Young Vic next year. The show, based on the life of Alison Bechdel — who created U.S. comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For — is adapted from her graphic novel memoir about growing up in smalltown Pennsylvania where her father ran a funeral home . . . hence the title!

Bechdel (right) says her father was a ‘manic-depressive closeted fag’, and the work charts their relationship and how she came out to her parents. It is a powerful, poignant piece, with three actresses playing Bechdel from girl to student to adult.

Book and lyrics are by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori — who wrote the superb Caroline, Or Change (which director Michael Longhurst is rehearsing now for a run at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre).

Kron and Tesori won Tony honours for best book and score. Sam Gold (who won a Tony for directing) told me Fun Home will open in London in summer 2018. He is planning a totally ‘fresh’ production and does not expect to bring over any of the American cast. ‘It won’t be a re-tread,’ Gold insisted when we bumped into each other after seeing A Doll’s House, Part 2, Lucas Hnath’s imagining of what happened to Ibsen’s Nora (a sharp, witty Laurie Metcalf) after she shut the door on husband (Chris Cooper).

Gold also scored a hit last year with a scorching Othello at New York Theatre Workshop featuring Daniel Craig and David Oyelowo.

The original Broadway producer of Fun Home, Barbara Whitman, has joined forces with multi-Olivier award-winning Sonia Friedman. The Young Vic confirmed ‘we are in talks to bring the show here next year’. In fact, talks have been going on for two years or more, but the Young Vic had to wait for Gold to become available.