Musical theatre is generally considered the purview of gay men, but ‘Fun Home’ proves that musical theatre is deeply, deeply sapphic.
When I was 14 I fell madly in love. Now, many would argue that 14 year olds lack the emotional maturity to experience true love and they would be correct, but at the time I would not listen to reason, and I pursued the object of my affection — a school prefect 3 years my senior — with a wild and embarrassing fervour.
One of my favourite pastimes was belting out ‘On My Own’ from Les Misérables, changing the pronouns so I was singing about another girl. I did this often, occasionally crying a little, because I was very cool. While my school friends listened to late 90s triple j and hooked up with boys who could sell us bad acid, I listened to emotional ‘I want’ songs from classic musicals.
It’s no coincidence that I took comfort in musical theatre. While as an art form, musical theatre is generally considered the purview of gay men, with its camp excess and absurdity, I put it to you that musical theatre is deeply, deeply sapphic. It’s feelings upon feelings upon feelings, and the show simply cannot go on without a gruff butch stage manager calling the shots.
The thing is, despite this, a search through the back catalogue of musicals reveals a dearth of explicitly lesbian characters. We got a nod (and an absolute banger of a duet) in Rent and we’ll always have Calamity Jane singing about ‘a woman’s touch’, but for decades we had nothing truly driven by a queer woman’s perspective.
Enter Fun Home in 2015, an unlikely adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, a dark tale of growing up in a funeral home, coming out, grief and family secrets, with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori. Bechdel is arguably best known for the pop cultural phenomenon of The Bechdel Test but to queer women she is so much more. And to queer women who love musical theatre, she’s iconic.
For Clemence Williams, associate director of the Sydney Theatre Company production of Fun Home that opened last week, Bechdel’s work means “a huge amount”.
“When I think of lesbians in musicals it was just that cameo of the lighting designer in The Producers. It’s just one joke. I’m like, ah, that’s what I’ve been told a lesbian is by musicals up until this point.”
“I heard the music [to Fun Home] in late 2015 and I’ve just been obsessed ever since,” she adds. “I read her graphic novels, I read Dykes To Watch Out For. And I felt this weird sense of grief that I hadn’t had this when I was coming out. It was, like, these friends that I needed and didn’t have, and now I’ve got them in this book – and this show – forever.”
Now starring in Fun Home, Maggie McKenna first saw the show on Broadway in 2016. “I was blown away and completely destroyed emotionally,” she says. “I’d never seen a show I connected to as much as I did with this one. Just seeing a young woman in college, which I was at the time, discovering her sexuality. I felt like I was the same.”
Fun Home isn’t just explicitly queer in that the central character is a lesbian, it also grapples with the trauma of her losing her father — a closeted gay man — to suicide. For director Dean Bryant, the work’s ability to traverse this complexity so deftly was what drew him to the show.
“It’s so well-made, so succinct, every line,” he says, “but I think probably the pain underneath it is what I am drawn to. We all long to have our parents understand us and to be able to live the life that we feel comfortable with.”
Dean concedes that as a gay man he hasn’t had to wait nearly as long to be represented in theatre. Indeed, there are more white gay men in major Artistic Director roles in Australia right now than there is any other demographic.
“The joy for me has actually been having Clem and Maggie and Carmel Dean [musical director] and Isabel Hudson who’s in design, getting to be in their presence as they work on material that literally speaks to their lives, to be amongst people that are getting to feel that for the first time.”
The team have taken great delight in celebrating a queer sensibility and aesthetic in the work, and on drawing on the diverse expression of sexuality present in the rehearsal room.
“I think when I’ve approached some of the works that I’ve directed, I’ve wanted to apologise for myself and my aesthetic and my needs, when in fact it’s something to be celebrated,” reflects Clem. “[Working on Fun Home], I’ve never felt once that I’ve had to modify myself or my gender and sexuality coding, to the point where Dean has got all of the [actors playing] Alison to watch me walk around the room to make sure that they walk like a ‘real’ lesbian.”
Thank God someone is taking charge of ensuring butch swagger makes it to the stage!
Fun Home’s celebration of not just lesbian identity, but butch lesbian identity sets it even further apart from most representations of queer womanhood, not only in musicals but across the entertainment industry.
In the canon of musical TV shows, queer women have been given a little more than on stage, though often with what I refer to as the ‘bisexual afterthought’ exemplified in Glee or Crazy Ex Girlfriend, where a woman is written as straight only to come out as bisexual once the show has an established fanbase (and once those fans have pointed out that character’s Big Queer Energy). This isn’t to erase the importance of bisexual representation (don’t cancel me, some of my best life partners are bisexual), but a Season 3 coming out is very different to a character being written as queer from the pilot.
While the Tony-award-winning success of Fun Home didn’t see an immediate onslaught of more lesbian musicals, hopefully its impending success here in Australia sees theatre companies continue to invest not only in queer artists (we’re everywhere) but in explicitly queer work. Hopefully when my own kid is a teenager filled with hopefully queer yearning, they have a veritable buttload of passionate ‘I want’ songs to sing, and they don’t have to change the pronouns.
Fun Home is currently playing at the Sydney Theatre Company.
Maeve Marsden is directing a lesbian musical later this year so make sure you’re following her on Twitter.
