Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Novel ‘Fun Home’ to Become a Stage Musical

Great talent is converging with playwright Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori adapting Alison Bechdel’s critically lauded graphic novel Fun Home to a stage musical via the Sundance Institute Theater Program.

Bechdel created a spot-on microcosm of lesbian life, politics, love and pop culture with her long-running comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” from 1983 – 2008, and while that strip was certainly semi-autobiographical, her graphic novel Fun Home focused on  her upbringing in her home that housed the Bechdel Funeral Home and on her relationship with her father.

“My father and I grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist,” Bechdel’s character says in Fun Home.

This is one of my favorite books (graphic novel) and if you haven’t read it I can’t recommend it enough.  I expect a movie or TV show to come from this book eventually, but never imagined a musical.  I’d love to see it.