‘Fun Home’

Graphic novel as play covers three stages of life.

Musicals inspired by source material are based on many things: movies, novels, plays, a catalog of pop hits.

The Tony Award-winning “Fun Home,” which opens in a Zoetic Stage production as part of the Theatre Up Close series at Miami’s Arsht Center this week, wouldn’t exist were it not for a memoir done in the form of a graphic novel.

Writer-cartoonist Alison Bechdel, a 2014 MacArthur “genius grant” fellow, told her family’s complicated story in the 2006 memoir “Fun Home,” which she subtitled “A Family Tragicomic.” Composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist-book writer Lisa Kron spent five years creating a vignette-filled musical from Bechdel’s memories, both winning 2015 Tonys for their work.

Several South Florida companies tried getting the rights to be the first to produce “Fun Home” in the region. Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer and then managing director Nicholas Richberg flew to New York to make a pitch at the offices of Samuel French, which licenses the show, and succeeded.

Meltzer, whose company won six Carbonell Awards last week including best production of a musical for Zoetic’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” hadn’t seen either New York production of “Fun Home” (the show debuted at off-Broadway’s Public Theater in 2013, then moved to Broadway’s Circle in the Square in 2015). But he fell for the music and the story of a lesbian cartoonist revisiting her family history.

“Everybody who saw it in New York told me they thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. This is Stuart all over,’ ” Meltzer says. “I listened to the cast CD and fell in love with it. I thought it had a lot of similarities to the work we do already. The music is a pop score, and what comes through is the humanity of this woman trying to piece together the past in a really touching way. I knew it would be really great in the Carnival Studio Theater space.”

Although “Fun Home” is told from the perspective of the grown-up Alison, three versions of her appear in the musical. Small Alison, age 10, is played by Alexa Lasanta, who has toured nationally in “The Sound of Music” and who starred as Mary Lennox in Slow Burn Theatre’s “The Secret Garden.” Kimmi Johnson plays Medium Alison, a 19-year-old in the throes of her first lesbian relationship. The adult Alison is played by Anna Lise Jensen, whose work this season has included starring in Slow Burn’s “The Bridges of Madison County” and appearing in “Once” at Actors’ Playhouse.

“Fun Home” is running through May 13 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., in Miami. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, and 4 p.m. Sunday. Tickets cost $50-$55. To order, call 305-949-6722 or go to ArshtCenter.org.

MICHAEL MCKEEVER/COURTESY Although “Fun Home” is told from the perspective of the grown-up Alison, three versions of her appear in the musical. Kimmi Johnson, Anna Lise Jensen and Alexa Lasanta play cartoonist Alison Bechdel at different ages.