The Fun Home that wasn’t much fun, but was well done
Fun Home was the first of three Broadway musicals I saw in 27 hours last August. The ‘Fun’ stood for ‘Funeral’ and the plot centred around a closeted gay man who commits suicide. (No spoiler there. It was mentioned early on.) It’s since finished its New York run, but is on tour in the United States.
I’m not convinced it was really a new kind of musical, but a good line nonetheless.I suspect that the serious nature of the piece helped it beat Something Rotten! for the main Tony award, even though I thought the latter was more entertaining.So many gay-themed stories concentrate, naturally enough, on a man who comes out of the closet, but the wife’s story can be more interesting. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are proving that on TV in the series Grace and Frankie. Judy Kuhn was compelling in Fun Home.A Broadway theatre doesn’t have to be physically located on the street called Broadway. Rather, it needs at least 500 seats. The Circle in the Square Theatre had 776, less than half the number in the Majestic (where they play The Phantom of the Opera). It meant we had a close view, even though we were near the back. I bought the tickets at the half-price booth less than an hour before the show. It would have been longer, but our Amtrak train from Virginia was late, which we’d half-expected.
