Singapore is doing its very own production of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Here's why you should be excited.
Singaporean theater company Pangdemonium is on a roll, you guys. Yesterday, they were in the news for their plans to stage two separate versions of beloved, LGBT-themed musical Rent, one with a same-sex kiss (R18) and one with the kiss omitted (Advisory 16). They also announced this week that for their last show of the 2017 season, they will be tackling another LGBT-themed Tony Award-winning musical, Fun Home, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel.
Why is this a big deal? Well, for starters, Fun Home is an amazing, tender graphic novel that covers Bechdel's own sexual discovery around the time of her closeted father's apparent suicide. The New York Times, The Times of London and Amazon all called it one of the best books of 2006. The musical adaptation, which began off-Broadway and ended up on the big stage, won dozens of awards, including five Tonys.
Now, the Drama Centre Theater at the National Library, where the performance will be staged next September, is not a Broadway theater, but that's part of the excitement. We're so impressed Pangdemonium will take on this wonderful and important play in an intimate setting, especially given the fact that the play's main themes will no doubt make the MDA rating an issue.
Alison Bechdel, in case you don't know, is a MacArthur Genius Grant-winning American graphic novelist and an LGBT cult personality, famous for Are You My Mother, the follow-up graphic memoir layering psychoanalysis, the biography of Virginia Woolf and her own relationship with her mother, as well as, the oft-quoted feminist Bechdel Test.
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