Abstract
This chapter considers the social and aesthetic conditions surrounding the adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) into a 2013 Broadway musical, paying particular attention to the play’s queer subject matter. Beginning with the premise that adaptation is itself a queer process, the chapter examines the adaptation of Fun Home as both product (commercial and aesthetic) and process (of recognition and remembrance). The musical’s recognition affirms the cultural legitimacy of the lesbian coming-of-age-story it depicts, and participates in negotiating broader social adaptations – in this case adaptations to queerness. The success of Fun Home illustrates that family and sexuality are also queer adaptations, forms of belonging that are continually revised in relation to changing norms.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Groundbreaking” frequently describes the musical in both reviews and promotional materials. The Public Theater uses this word to promote Fun Home in their promotional emails, as does Broadway.com. See “FUN HOME,” Broadway.com, March 11, 2016 and Brantley, Ben. 2015. “Review: ‘Fun Home’ at Circle in the Square Theater.” New York Times, April 19.
- 2.
Other Tony wins include: Best Book of a Musical (Lisa Kron); Best Original Score (Jeanine Tesori); Best Leading Actor in a Musical (Michael Cerveris); Best Director of a Musical (Sam Gold). Fun Home was also nominated for: Best Leading Actress in a Musical (Beth Malone); Best Featured Actress in a Musical (three nominations for Emily Skeggs, Judy Kuhn, and Sydney Lucas); Best Lighting Design of a Musical (Ben Stanton); Best Scenic Design of a Musical (David Zinn); Best Orchestrations (John Clancy). The off-Broadway run at the Public earned Fun Home New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Obie, Outer Critics Circle, and Lucille Lortel awards for Best Musical.
- 3.
Notable Broadway musicals with gay male characters: Cabaret (1972); The Rocky Horror Show (1973); La Cage aux Folles (1983); Rent (1996); Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998); Avenue Q (2003); Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (2006); Spring Awakening (2006); Kinky Boots (2013). Aside from secondary lesbian/lesbian-leaning characters in Rent (1996) and The Color Purple (2004), there have been no out lesbian characters in Broadway musicals.
- 4.
American musicals, since Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in 1927, have long been adapted from novels, plays, and, more recently, films. The first nine winners of the Best Musical Tony were based on books and plays, beginning with Kiss Me, Kate in 1949. In the past 30 years, 82 per cent of musicals were adaptations, and in the past 10 years musicals adapted from Hollywood films have outnumbered both original musicals and musicals adapted from literature, producing 21 movies-to-musicals. For analysis of the trends in Broadway musical adaptations, see Ken Davenport’s informative blog, The Producer’s Perspective: http://www.theproducersperspective.com/. See also Healy, Patrick. 2013. “Like the Movie, Only Different: Hollywood’s Big Bet on Broadway Adaptations.” New York Times August 1.
- 5.
Regarding comics, the Angoulême International Comics Festival, one of the best-known and longest-running events dedicated to comics, has met frequent criticism for its failure to recognize women, attracting particular scrutiny in 2016 when a group called BD Egalité, or Women in Comics Collective Against Sexism, called for a boycott because no women had been nominated for awards. As BD Egalité emphasized, at stake in this lack of recognition is not just prestige in itself, but the economic and cultural capital that follow from it. See “French Comic Festival Marred by Sexism Row.” 2016. BBC.com. January 6.
- 6.
See Miller, D. A. 1998. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- 7.
I am gesturing toward the work of/influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- 8.
See: “Anti-Porn Group Challenges Gay Graphic Novel.” 2008. QSaltLake April 7; Driscoll, Molly. 2014. “Alison Bechdel’s Memoir ‘Fun Home’ Runs into Trouble with the South House of Representatives.” Christian Science Monitor February 28; Ballentine, Claire. 2015. “Freshmen Skipping ‘Fun Home’ for Moral Reasons.” The Duke Chronicle August 21.
- 9.
King Lear and Carousel are, as far as this author knows, the only examples of plays or musicals about fathers and daughters.
- 10.
Kron was nominated for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play and Jayne Houdyshell for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play.
- 11.
The Public has produced several important musicals including Hair (1967/revival 2009); A Chorus Line (1975); Runaways (1978); Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk (1995/96); The Wild Party (2000); Caroline, or Change (2003/04); Passing Strange (2008); Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2010); and Hamilton (2015).
- 12.
Spiegelman rejected the notion of story as narrative, defining story instead as “complete horizontal division of a building…[from Medieval Latin HISTORIA…a row of windows with pictures on them].”
- 13.
Richard Dyer (1993) describes the conventional (read: white, middle-class, and heteronormative) aesthetic of Hollywood film musicals as structured around “linear progression and completion”; “white musicals,” Dyer writes, “imagine the pleasure of changing oneself and the world, the utopia of transformation” (104).
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. 1991. The Culture Industry. Ed and Introduction, J. M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge.
Bechdel, Alison. 2006. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston and New York: Mariner.
———. 2012. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
———. 2015. “Queers and Comics.” keynote address, CUNY Graduate Center. June 23. YouTube, Accessed October 24, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQrKPmnrZYw.
“Behind the Music of Fun Home with Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori.” 2015. Broadway.com, May 28. YouTube. Accessed October 24, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y41OlmKR0C4.
Bolton, Michael. 2012. “The Ethics of Alterity: Adapting Queerness in Brokeback Mountain.” Adaptation 5 (1): 35–56.
Brantley, Ben. 2015. “Review: ‘Fun Home’ at Circle in the Square Theater.” New York Times, April 19.
Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Intrepreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota Press.
Dyer, Richard. 1993. “Is Car Wash a Black Musical?.” In Black American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship, edited by Manthia Diawara, New York: Routledge.
English, James. F. 2005. The Economy of Prestige. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Handyside, Fiona. 2011. “Queer Filiations: Adaptation in the Films of François Ozon.” Sexualities 15 (1): 53–67.
Healy, Patrick. 2014. “Cast of ‘Fun Home’ Heading to South Carolina Amid Dispute Over Book.” New York Times, April 17.
Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Kluge, Alexander. 2012. “On Film and the Public Sphere.” In Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, edited by Tara Forrest, 33–49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Kron, Lisa, and Jeanine Tesori. 2015. Fun Home. New York: Samuel French.
Leitch, Thomas. 2007. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lydenberg, Robin. 2012. “Under Construction: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” European Journal of English Studies 16 (1): 57–68.
“MacArthur Fellows Program.” 2014. MacArthur Foundation, September 17. Accessed November 15, 2015. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/908/
Mattila, Kalle Oskara. 2016. “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home.” The Atlantic, April 25. Accessed October 24, 2016. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/.
Miller, D. A. 1998. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moore, Anne Elizabeth. 2009. “The Father, The Daughter: Review of Fun Home.” Wellesley Centers for Women Online, Accessed November 15, 2015. www.wcwonline.org/WRB-Issues/377.
Newmark, Judith. 2015. “’Fun Home’ Speaks to Changes on Broadway and in America.” St. Louis Dispatch, June 12. http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-speaks-to-changes-on-broadway-and-in-america/article_506d33c6-e3de-50ca-ae26-5b32f03418e0.html.
“A New American Musical Starts Next Month!” 2016. Public Theatre. info@publictheater.org. Email. January 20.
Raw, Laurence, and Defne Ersin Tutan. 2012. Introduction to The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past, edited by Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan, 7-23. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Rudolph, Eric. 2015. “‘Fun Home’ on Broadway Audio: Intimacy in the Round.” Mix, September 25. Accessed January 10, 2016. http://www.mixonline.com/news/venues/fun-home-broadway-audio/425717.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Spiegelman, Art. 1978. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*!. New York: Pantheon.
Thurman, Judith. 2015. “Finish Line.” New Yorker, May 11. Accessed April 19, 2017. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/finish-line-backstage-at-fun-home.
Tolmie, Jane. 2009. “Modernism, Memory and Desire: Queer Cultural Production in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” TOPIA 22: 77–95. Accessed October 24, 2016. http://topia.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/topia/article/view/31865/31573.
“Works and Process at the Guggenheim: Fun Home of Broadway.” 2015. YouTube, March 21. Accessed October 24, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ziz1tij_Jsc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mansbridge, J. (2017). Adapting Queerness, Queering Adaptation: Fun Home on Broadway. In: Kennedy-Karpat, C., Sandberg, E. (eds) Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52853-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52854-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)