Graphic novel turned musical ‘Fun Home’ back in Bay Area
It’s a coming-of-age story, a coming out story, and a dynamic, catchy and deeply touching musical. That’s “Fun Home,” which TheatreWorks Silicon Valley is presenting at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
With a book by playwright Lisa Kron (“Well”) and music by Jeanine Tesori (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Shrek”), the Tony Award-winning 2013 musical is based on the acclaimed 2006 autobiographical graphic novel of the same name by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, recounting her childhood around the family funeral home, the blooming of her sexuality in college and her awkward relationship with her closeted father.
“It’s remarkably powerful,” says TheatreWorks founder and artistic director Robert Kelley, who’s directing the show. “It’s a really wonderful summation of the differences between generations, a more modern generation in the ’80s and forward and a much more repressed generation in the years prior to that. It’s about a father who lives in terror of his secret homosexuality being revealed and a daughter who discovers herself and her sexual identity in an era when there’s ever so much more freedom and understanding and tolerance.”
“And between those two things,” he adds, “you come to realize the incredible cost of prejudice to individuals, to families, to everybody. When I saw it, I was so moved that I immediately decided we needed to do it at TheatreWorks.”
He’d have to wait a bit, as the show went from New York’s Public Theater to Broadway success and the subsequent tour that popped through the Curran in San Francisco early last year. But Kelley goes way back with Tesori, having produced her first musical, “Galileo,” at TheatreWorks in 1990, and later doing “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change” as well.
Musicals based on comics aren’t all that uncommon. Perhaps the first was “The Better ’Ole,” an English musical comedy in 1917 based on Bruce Bairnsfather’s World War I “Fragments from France” cartoons. There have been Superman, Batman and Spider-Man musicals, as well as one based on Mad magazine. “Annie” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” are of course based on newspaper comic strips, and “Li’l Abner,” “Luann,” “Doonesbury” and “The Addams Family” have all had the musical treatment.
This is hardly the first time TheatreWorks has produced a musical based on a graphic novel. Patrons may remember Min Kahng’s “Four Immigrants” last year, based on Japanese immigrant Henry Kiyama’s 1920s autobiographical manga about his early days as a fresh arrival in San Francisco. “The Man in the Ceiling,” based on a Jules Feiffer graphic novel, was in the 2015 New Works Festival.
In fact the company’s first musical based on a graphic novel was back in 1973, not long after Kelley founded
TheatreWorks in 1970. “Odd Bodkins” was based on the work of cartoonist Dan O’Neill, who had a comic strip of the same name in the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960s.
“Like many other successful cartoonists, he created a book, but the book wasn’t a collection of existing cartoons,” says Kelley, who also directed “Odd Bodkins.” “It was basically a graphic novel called ‘Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking ... Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking.’ And it was just fascinating. Dan lived in the Bay Area, and I still remember going over to his house to ask him if he would allow us to turn it into a musical. He just couldn’t believe anybody would want to do that. But we did, and it became a big hit for us.”
That wasn’t quite before the term “graphic novel” was coined, but it was certainly some years before it came into common usage.
“That was an era when graphic novels weren’t really understood or truly appreciated, but they’ve obviously come a very long way,” Kelley reflects. “And you see ‘Fun Home’ and that’s just genius all the way.”