Fun Home Previews — Page 16

Sadly, I think Whizzer nailed it, I've got family meeting in NYC for a once in a lifetime get together, I've got my tickets for FH, had them for a while, it seems most of my very "Christian" family will be going to something else. I hate to think what that implies but they do range in age from 60-70. We're growing up, most of the haters will be dead soon.

The only thing that I have a beef with is that the lyrics in the show suggest with certainty that Bruce committed suicide. The novel left that in doubt and I can't help thinking that anyone jumping in front of a truck dosen't do it backwards, which is what the truck driver said. Does it matter, probably in the end no, if Bruce dosen't jump out in front of that truck there is no show. I have mentioned this somewhere before but I witnessed a jump in front of the truck suicide, the backing up testimony leaves me leaning toward saw a snake, despite all the problems he's going through at the time this would be my inclination to believe. If I could ask AB one question it would be about that.

South Florida, I got to the impression that in the book she *basically* decided it was a suicide too. However, it was more vague, and my view may be covered from when I did a paper involving it five or so years back and went thru a ton of Bechdel interviews where she seemed to say that since the book came out she had decided that it was for certain (maybe that is why it's more clear in the musical.)

And thanks Whizzer and Someone in a Tree for the nice words in the pointless After8 argument. I'll try to resist a reply other than to say, After8--I gave you specific examples of adventurous shows that didn't work for me--since you asked--and you ignored that. You have yet to answer any of your own questions or mine--you asked for a considerate discussion in your post (though I doubt anyone bought the sincerity of that) and that's what I initially offered you. Repeating the same thing, particularly with increasingly pejorative language, is not a participating in a discussion. Oh well.

Updated On: 4/11/15 at 06:24 PM

Pulled out the book. It's at the start of chapter 2 (about 25 pages in) The picture of him hauling stuff and not watching the road accompanies a caption "Maybe he was just [...]" The next panel says "but these are just quibbles I don't believe it was an accident."

In the previous chapter she already says repeatedly that he killed himself. That's the only time she really offers any doubt and I think the illustration is just meant to show what some say happened--obviously not what DID happen or what she felt. In the end (comparing it to Leopold Bloom's father in Ullyses--a reference I don't miss in the musical lol) she says "But he did hurtle himself into the sea of course" (and there's a panel of a truck coming towards the reader.)

Am I dreaming this or was there another incident in the book where he cowered from a snake, did the truck driver say he backed into it, or did I imagine that? Thanks Eric.

EM and AE you guys need to have a cease fire, you're both smart people that make me go for the thesaurus, bet ya could have a few cocktails together before a show.

Cool

"and I have to wonder (or not) why A8 has simply refused to address that the show maybe won't catch on because of homophobic attitudes? He probably sees that as an excuse with no basis in reality..."

Exactly.

Cf. La Cage aux Folles, Gemini, Angels in America, The Normal Heart, Torch Song Trilogy, The Killing of Sister George, The Boys in the Band...

A8 only one of those was a musical, and it was about as safe a musical about a gay couple as you could have if you want to appeal to a broad audience... (Although Kiss of the Spider Woman fits there, but it did infamously have trouble selling tickets to some of its planned tour dates.) The Normal Heart had limited runs for both major New York productions... Etc. Once again you ignored my questions. Well played.

Great review.

I didn't realize they already have a tie-in edition of the graphic memoir.

"only one of those was a musical, "

Which means what, exactly? That homophobes only restrict their homophobia to musicals?

"and it was about as safe a musical about a gay couple as you could have if you want to appeal to a broad audience..."

Nonsense. It was considered quite a risky venture at the time it opened. The problem --- for people like you, at least --- is that it sought to appeal to an audience, instead of spitting in its face. And it did appeal to them, by providing a good book and score, warmth and humanity, and excellent entertainment. Something the "brave" and "adventurous" musicals we are told we all must bow and scrape before fail, and actually willfully refuse to do.

"The Normal Heart had limited runs for both major New York productions... Etc."

It had three.

"Etc."

Ha Ha Ha. I love how you dismiss three shows that ran over a thousand performances with "etc."

"Once again you ignored my questions."

I asked you one simple question, that you failed to answer. Did you see this show?

If you didn't, you shouldn't be carrying on as the world's foremost authority on the subject.

Nor on any other show you haven't seen. Or have seen, for that matter.

Eric and SF: yes, the graphic memoir is more careful to allow that Bruce's death might indeed have been an accident, as officially reported -- though even in the book, Bechdel makes it clear that she and her mother always thought otherwise. (In short interviews, she sometimes simply refers to her father as having "killed himself," without further explanation).

I agree that the book is somewhat more ambiguous than the show, and that that ambiguity is a good thing and even a necessary one, as it speaks -- in the most dramatic imaginable context -- to the impossibility of ever really knowing another person's motivations, which is ultimately one of the book's bigger themes: words, pictures, a painstakingly-assembled documentary record and a searching intelligence as exquisitely sensitive as Alison Bechdel's STILL aren't enough to allow her (or us) access to her father's mind.

But I think her adaptors have done a creditable job in preserving this ambiguity as far as possible. Alison's line "Was it because of me? I'm afraid it ...wasn't. That's the crazy thing, Dad, I'm afraid it wasn't!" (or, on Broadway, the simpler and less bad-laugh-courting "Was it because of me, or did it have nothing to do with me??") could be thought to question not only Bruce's motivation but also his agency in the matter of his own death. And most importantly, "Edges of the World" leaves him in front of the oncoming truck asking "Oh my god, why am I standing here??" in stunned incomprehension. If the book scrupulously illustrated his death as perhaps the most overdetermined "accident" imaginable, the show conversely suggests a largely unpremeditated and nearly-inadvertent "suicide," occasioned by a moment of tortured self-absorption but not necessarily by any explicit will to die.

Can a lazy audience still read "Edges" as a straightforward "suicide aria" à la Javert -- a moment of introspection so agonizing and engulfing that, by the final verse, the singer comes to see self-annihilation as his only escape? (Complete with powerfully-ironic reprise of his opposite-number's earlier, benign epiphany: in this case, Medium Alison's "am I falling into nothingness, or flying into something so sublime...?"). Sure, but comparing FUN HOME with LES MISÉRABLES doesn't really give Kron and Tesori their full due. When I saw FH at the Public I was a little too ready to go there myself, viewing "Edges" as unwisely overdramatic and a bit formulaic. But I've since come to appreciate the song more on its own merits. And as restaged by Gold at Circle in the Square, it's a quietly stunning one, with Cerveris no longer floating in a claustrophobically-black void singing straight out into a white-hot spotlight (as was the somewhat dully pro-forma case downtown), but instead negotiating a shadowy minefield of which, to our stealthily-increasing alarm, he seems barely even peripherally aware.

Updated On: 5/17/15 at 09:27 AM