Corvid's Corner - June 2024

Welcome to Corvid’s Corner! This is a place for me to geek out about whatever video game I’m playing or music I’m listening to, and write about it in a longer form than a staff pick. If you try this album on for size, please let me know! I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Let me introduce you to my guilty pleasure: musical theater. Over the years, I have been made fun of for loving Broadway musicals, but the glitz and glam has always been more attractive to me than bullying could ever deter. That sounds a touch melodramatic, I agree, but I think it fits with today’s subject, which is a little different from what I have covered so far in Corvid’s Corner. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel published in 2006 that was adapted into a musical.  Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical opened Off-Broadway in 2013. Both the book and the musical have since gone on to be nominated and win numerous awards, including the coveted Tony Award. Despite many accolades, the book has been challenged in an attempt to ban the story in different libraries, but the important stories of marginalized communities are often subject to more scrutiny.

The memoir follows Bechdel through her youth in rural Pennsylvania, focusing on her perplexing relationship with her father, Bruce. Alison grapples with the realization that her father was in some legal trouble due to relationships with some of his high school students, and struggles to come to terms with the similarities and differences in her and her father’s journeys. Throughout the tale, she navigates difficult life experiences such as her sexuality and the death of her father, as well as mundane ones like getting her first menstrual period and leaving for college. She offers numerous culture touchstones to the reader, like television shows and the Nixon-era Watergate Trials to help ground the narrative in time. She painstakingly uses multiple art mediums to convey her story, and each page is full of small yet accurate details. Relying on first person sources, Bechdel used real letters, notes, and diary entries to add realism to her panels. She even took posed photos of herself to use as reference for her drawings. These tactics resulted in a beautiful work of art that readers can come back to time and time again, and inspired Lisa Kron to write a stunning musical.

Fun Home: a New Broadway Musical opened off-Broadway at The Public Theater in New York City on October 22, 2013, and the run was extended several times until it closed in January 2014. In 2015, the production was moved to Broadway and much of the original cast and crew reprised their roles. It closed in 2016 after 582 performances. It has had other smaller productions around the nation and the world since closing on Broadway. The orchestra was small, the cast was smaller, and the sets were pretty simple. It doesn’t bowl you over with flashy show-stopping numbers and glitter, but rather draws viewers in with the characters and emotional accompaniment. The score is where the show truly shines. The opening song, “It All Comes Back (Opening)” culminates with an intense discordance, alluding to the heavy family dysfunction right off the bat, the main theme of the story. Lisa Kron did not shy away from the pain of being in a rigid family with skeletons in the closet, and wrote her screenplay without compromising Bechdel’s story. Kron did a neat thing with the characterization of Alison that I’ve never seen before. Since the story follows through her life, there are three actresses that play different stages of her life: Small Alison (10 years old), Medium Alison (19 years old), and Alison (43 years old). Each actress has an opportunity to bring down the house with their vocals. The songs add to the experience of this gut-wrenching coming of age story, they don’t subtract. When coming up with my list of song recommendations like I normally do, it was tough not to include every song on the album, because they all hit for different reasons! “Telephone Wire” is considered the climax of the show, as it parallels the climax of the memoir, where Alison and Bruce go for a drive on one of her visits home from college. This particular visit came shortly after Alison came out to her parents via letter, and Alison gained the knowledge that she and her father shared something more than DNA: they are both homosexuals. Alison desperately wants her father to see her, but to her, he appears too preoccupied with his own life to truly reach an understanding. This song chronicles their last encounter before Bruce tragically dies by stepping in the path of a semi-truck. There was no note, no final manifesto, and the death was ruled an accident, but Alison concludes that Bruce’s death was a suicide. She questions if her coming out as a lesbian contributed to his triggers for suicide, but this question is never definitively answered. The play ends with a beautiful performance sung by the three Alisons. The play wraps up nicely with a bow in “Flying Away (Finale)” by calling viewers back to multiple songs, with Big Alison echoing the words of her past selves for the whole song. The last line is the first time her voice comes through in this song; Alison’s final caption closes the final panel in her graphic memoir in her own words. 

Fun Home, no matter which media you choose, is about understanding your place in the world and finding your place within your family, even amidst the ups and downs of family dysfunction. Bechdel’s memoir isn’t the easiest to read at times, but I think that’s what makes it worthwhile. As a library worker, I don’t tend to keep a lot of books in my personal collection, because I know I can read any book any time I like. Fun Home is one that I have kept on my shelf, even after many seasons of decluttering. It’s a long-time favorite, and I love to come back to it every few years. The Broadway album is no different, and I listen to it with regularity, though I don’t own it on CD. While writing this blog post, I enjoyed going between the book and the corresponding song. Kron took some lines verbatim from Bechdel’s memoir, and it felt like an Easter-egg hunt. If you like character analysis, literary references, and detailed art, I would highly recommend the book to you. If you enjoy orchestral music, colorful dialogue, and beautiful voices, give the album a listen. It’ll be enjoyable either way. Both have value, and I think they complement each other very well. Both can be requested from our library system.

Must Listen: Come to the Fun Home, Changing My Major, Ring of Keys, Days and Days, and Telephone Wire.

For a heart-wrenching multimedia experience about the struggles a family endures in the face of personal discovery, giveFun Home:A New MusicalorFun Home: A Family Tragicomica try.