Fun Home (Broadway) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Member Reviews (4,455)
See it if entertaining, different, off-broadway feel. Interesting, not riveting. Niche story. Great actors!! Cute score. Not memorable.
Don't see it if you like stories with an end (happy or sad). This one ends with no conclusion, catharsis nor deeper self knowledge.
See it if You enjoy alternative stories about the LGBT community. If you like strong performances by women, Judy Kuhn is wonderful.
Don't see it if You are expecting a big musical with big musical numbers and memorable songs. None of those are present. Which is ok.
See it if you're open to a moving contemporary story.Liked it better at the Public, but it was still powerful on Broadway. Good songs and performances
Don't see it if you want a strong story arc with a satisfying ending. The end was tacked on, but the show was so great that it didn't matter.
See it if You can relate to the feeling of not fitting in or having a parent that didn't get you for no fault of your own.
Don't see it if You can't find any empathy for people battling deamons in their lives.
See it if You want original, thoughtful, theater. So good!
Don't see it if You are homophobic and unoriginal.
See it if You want to fall in love with the characters and feel their struggle, tenderness, joy, anguish and grief.
Don't see it if You would rather avoid the topics of coming out and suicide. It's worth it - see it before it closes!! I saw it twice.
See it if you like innovative musical theater that explores difficult topics in an intelligent and warm way, like a great score and intense perfs
Don't see it if you are turned off by shows dealing with gay men and lesbians, expect big elaborate production numbers, don't like chamber musicals
See it if you seek a refreshing, moving, thoughtful family drama & coming-of-age story. The focus may be on gay themes, but the story is universal.
Don't see it if you are okay with missing out on one of the most original musicals on (or Off) Broadway.
Critic Reviews (50)
"The truth is that as personal as Bechdel’s tragic tale can be, it’s also a universal story of children refusing to believe that, hard as they try, they might never have the last word when it comes to their parents. It’s fitting that the show closes with a small moment in which little Alison and her father were as close as they ever would be. Sometimes it’s surprising to realize which things we remember vividly and which fade away."
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"Alison Bechdel’s provocative tale has now been translated to the stage in the extremely ambitious, extremely moving musical 'Fun Home.' While this show is hardly standard Broadway fare, this production, directed with great acuity by Sam Gold, is not just better than it was over a year ago at the Public Theater; it deserves to be the clear favorite for this year’s Tony Award for Best Musical."
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"'Fun Home' is, yes, a musical about a lesbian cartoonist whose closeted father killed himself, but it is also about how we try to figure out the puzzle of our parents; about how we reassemble our childhood; about memory itself. It remains the inventive, entertaining, in places exhilarating, and almost inexpressibly heartbreaking show I saw Off-Broadway at the Public Theater a couple of years ago. And it is now one of those rare Off-Broadway musicals that actually improves when it transfers to Broadway."
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“Why make Fun Home into a musical if you are going to strip away what makes it Fun Home? There is some literary name-dropping, but nothing on the intertextual level of Ms. Bechdel’s comic, and obviously the unique graphic element is lost on stage. What was a text about much more than just being gay, is here simply a coming out narrative. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what I know to be a funny, moving, and endlessly smart story is reflected back at me as fairly average Broadway fare.”
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"'Fun Home' compellingly conveys for an entire generation of gay men and women what being 'different' and what coming out was like...What emerges uniquely is a portrait of three individuals trapped in a time when there were no guidelines or role models for the personal crisis each of them faced individually...The cast is uniformly effective...'Fun Home' is a heartfelt, moving memoir of self-discovery."
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"There would have been a time when Alison Bechdel’s frank graphic-memoir would have never been considered for musicalization. But in these more enlightened times for both society and musical theater, Tesori and bookwriter-lyricist Lisa Kron were able to tackle the subject – and succeed mightily...Among the newcomers are Gabriella Pizzolo, Cole Grey and Zell Steele Morrow as the Bechdel tots...They’re delightful and hilarious in the show’s title song."
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"It’s a beautiful tangle of a story expertly staged by director Sam Gold. This theater is in the round, and it’s one of the smallest houses on Broadway so the show feels incredibly and appropriately intimate...I could go on and on about this show — how important it is for audiences to see, how it’s making commercial Broadway more relevant — but I think you get the point. 'Fun Home' is a special, special show."
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""The book is tightly structured with well-defined characters mined from the graphic novel...The music is the best new score on Broadway...Director Sam Gold has put together a polished production that is passionate, energized and sensitively mines the emotional depths of the musical."
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