The New York Times - Recommended
"..."Fun Home" knows where you live. Granted, it's unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway."
NY Daily News - Highly Recommended
"...`Fun Home' still moves you to your foundations...It's unconventional grist, but the material is handled with such expertise that it speaks universally about life, love, family, surviving... Be prepared to wipe away tears."
Associated Press - Highly Recommended
"..."A fresh musical that seems like an impossible sell on Broadway but hooks you instantly with its honesty and beauty. It is an adaptation from a graphic novel about growing up in a funeral home with a closeted gay dad. It should be theatrical suicide, and yet few shows are as moving, relatable and funny...Make sure 'Fun Home' is on your list."
Hollywood Reporter - Highly Recommended
"...Perhaps the most over-trafficked subject matter among contemporary American dramatists is the dysfunctional family. So one of the many wonders of the haunting musical Fun Home is the unique perspective it brings to that theme, in a deeply personal story that marries the specificity of individual experience with an emotional universality that will find echoes in many of our lives. Composer Jeanine Tesori and writer-lyricist Lisa Kron have done something extraordinary here, reshaping cartoonist Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir into an unconventional memory play that seamlessly integrates music and drama."
Vulture - Highly Recommended
"...'Fun Home' is still basically what it was when I reviewed it before: the story of a lesbian cartoonist trying to understand her father, who killed himself shortly after revealing to her that he, too, was gay. Back then I called it 'hilarious and crushing,' and it remains so now. Maybe less hilarious and more crushing."
Variety - Highly Recommended
"...New! Fresh! Original!...Lisa Kron assembles words and images in unexpected ways to dramatize the bittersweet memoir...Sam Gold's direction brings lucidity to the complex mechanics of staging a story that takes place in three time frames. And Jeanine Tesori's haunting music doesn't sound a bit like anyone else's."
USA Today - Highly Recommended
"..."Could a musical focusing on a lesbian cartoonist whose closeted father kills himself fly on Broadway? From the start, this adaptation of a graphic novel had all the earmarks of a contemporary hit: topical subject matter, a wittily irreverent but emotionally compelling book and score, and characters who are at once intriguingly idiosyncratic and instantly accessible. On Broadway, the show feels even more powerful, and more unsettling."
New York Post - Recommended
"...'Fun Home' has its weaknesses. The in-the-round staging often leaves you staring at an actor's back. And as appealing as the Alisons are - all three actresses are perfect - the torment of the unhappy parents makes them more interesting characters...Still, 'Fun Home' is an important show. That it managed to make it to Broadway at all is a reason to rejoice."
Newsday - Highly Recommended
"...Into a Broadway season dominated by movie retreads comes 'Fun Home,' the grown-up, disturbing, blazingly original heartbreaker. The musical play has lost a bit of close-up intimacy but none of its gripping enchantment in the transfer...This treasure retains the unpretentious feel of director Sam Gold's masterly production."
NorthJersey - Highly Recommended
"..."Saying 'Fun Home' is a musical about a family is like saying 'Hamlet' is a play about a prince. The brilliant show suggests that families are very complicated assemblages...It's very rare to see a musical with the emotional power of a fine play, but 'Fun Home' - touching, amusing, penetrating and honest - pulls it off."
Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Maybe there is a single moment when a child suddenly sees through the parents they love. Maybe it comes over time. Wherever you are in life, that progression from simple love to the fuller variety that includes judgment is not so nice to contemplate, really. "Fun Home" forces your hand there, although, thankfully, it does so with an exquisite understanding of the hope you get from children, whom you know will get to make their own lives, have their own fun, away from you. No wonder the audience sprang as one from its seats at the ending, and the start of living."
NBC New York - Highly Recommended
"..."Fun Home" is a masterful achievement-a tragic musical about learning to see one's parents as flawed human beings, and a story as raw and real as any on stage."
Time Out New York - Highly Recommended
"...Fun Home is a thing of rare beauty: a Broadway musical of enormous intelligence and sensitivity. Kron's libretto grabs you with humor, irony and poignant detail; Tesori's music, as in her classic score for Caroline, or Change, moves with great skill from tuneful pastiche (there's an irony-soaked Partridge Family-style number) to striking dramatic force. Impressive as it was in its 2013 premiere at the Public Theater, the show is even stronger now. Superbly restaged by Sam Gold for Circle in the Square's nearly in-the-round space, with David Zinn's set rising and sinking like memory, it emerges with fresh clarity: Malone's searching presence is more central, and Cerveris more sympathetic and complex. Fun Home is not your ordinary Broadway musical, because it is extraordinary. It sings outside the box."
The Wrap - Highly Recommended
"..."The best new play on Broadway at the moment is Lisa Kron's book for the musical 'Fun Home.' The mix of book and music cannot be faulted, and it's not just the songs that linger. Composer Tesori's use of recitative is sparing and her underscoring for some of Kron's dialogue is every bit as exquisite as the big arias."
New Yorker - Recommended
"The score is rich and troubled and psychologically nuanced...Sondheim has always realized the devastating power of inertia, and 'Fun Home' does, too...Tesori and Kron have adopted Sondheim's method without being derivative—their songs are character-driven gems."
The Guardian - Highly Recommended
"...Both Alison and her father sing, in heartfelt tones: 'I want to know what's true/ Dig deep into who/ And what and why and when.' The Broadway 'Fun Home' still leaves a lot of those interrogatives unanswered, yet it's remarkably gratifying, often heartrending, and fiercely humane."
Deadline - Highly Recommended
"...'Fun Home', the thoroughly engrossing, poignant show is neither depressing nor prurient. Quite the opposite: The staging by director Sam Gold remains so sensitively compelling that an awkward cast change and an even more awkward space have barely diminished the power of the show...'Fun Home' is a marvelous achievement, full of humor as well as rue. Its 100 transporting minutes fly by and then it's gone - not to be forgotten."
Los Angeles Times - Recommended
'There have been plenty of new American musicals better put together than "Fun Home," but I can't think of one in recent years that has touched me as much with its tender, ironic and courageous vulnerability."
CurtainUp - Recommended
"Kron and Tesori have found an effective device to tell this sometimes funny but often painful coming of age story...Familiarity with the source is not needed to follow this musical version of the author-artist's journey to understanding herself and her father. It's not a journey geared to mass-market audiences, but one open-minded, adventurous musical theater lovers will not want to miss. "
Talkin Broadway - Somewhat Recommended
"...Despite all that's excellent about 'Fun Home,' it stops significantly short of being an excellent musical...Kron and Tesori have accomplished enough to make this one of the season's few must-sees if you've never seen it before. But if 'Fun Home' shows how the illusion of mundanity can become vibrant uniqueness when allowed to flourish as it most desires, that's a transformation we're allowed to experience only from a distance."
Cititour.com - Highly Recommended
"...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."
TheaterMania - Recommended
"...There's always a hint of worry when an off-Broadway show transfers to Broadway. Will it lose the magic? Does it have what it takes to survive? In the case of 'Fun Home,' the answers are: 'heck no' and 'yes!' In fact, the thrilling nature of this groundbreaking look at adolescence has increased with its move...'Fun Home' is absolutely mind-blowing."
Scribicide - Not Recommended
"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."
Huffington Post - Highly Recommended
"...Seekers of provocative, invigorating and entertaining theatre--musical or dramatic--will find it at Circle in the Square. To those who think that Fun Home doesn't sound like their sort of entertainment: this is musical theatre at its best, so go anyway. You're likely to be surprised, and thrilled, and enthralled."
NY Theatre Guide - Highly Recommended
"Astonishing...That is what good writing is all about. We want adventure and a degree of safety all tied up in a bow. This production does that and more. This production soars and will be one of those iconic theatre events that will fall under the enviable rubric of "Did you see THAT production??? Hurry, hurry, hurry on over."
Stage Buddy - Highly Recommended
"..."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."
DC Theatre Scene - Highly Recommended
"...'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."
As Her World Turns - Highly Recommended
"...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."
Stu on Broadway - Highly Recommended
"..."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."
WNBC - Highly Recommended
"...'Fun Home' has only gotten richer...'Fun Home' is a masterful achievement-a tragic musical about learning to see one's parents as flawed human beings, and a story as raw and real as any on stage."
BroadwaySelect - Highly Recommended
"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."
