Friday, October 30, 2015

Body prep that can't be beat!

It's already been a year of entertainment highlights for me, like TWICE seeing John Cameron Mitchell reprise his role in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Ellen Greene reprise her role as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, and a staged reading of Carol Burnett's play about her childhood in Hollywood. On par with all of these performances, though, was the Broadway production of Fun Home, based on Alison Bechdel's graphic novel of the same name.

The book and the musical focus on Bechdel's upbringing in an emotionally dysfunctional family that owns a funeral home, her coming to terms with both her father's homosexuality and her own, and her father's eventual suicide. As dour as all this sounds, though, the musical manages to bring out the joy lurking around the corners of these difficult topics. This is none more apparent than in today's song, "Come to the Fun Home," which is a Partridge family-style extravaganza that the three Bechdel kids sing as a made-up advertisement for the family funeral home (nicknamed Fun Home). They make death fun! No wonder Fun Home won an armful of Tonys.

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