WiCkEDrOcKS wrote: "Oh, no After Eight hated FUN HOME. He's stated it ad nauseam. Don't get too excited. "
I saw this Sunday before heading out to JFK to catch my flight home, and I have to say that I agree with many of Mr.After8's criticism's.
SPOILER ALERTS ON REST OF THIS POST
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While it starts off really well and I nearly died out of pure joy at the kids Fun Home number, it gets too bogged down and slow at the end. The theatre's A/C was blasting and every old lady in the place was kvetching that they were freezing. Why was the A/C on? To keep everyone from falling asleep during the last half.
I just read an article at The Atlantic's site interviewing Bechdel which mentions that her brothers were with her to see it. This kind of made me feel relieved because I haven't read the book so all I could think about during the last half was "If this guy was cruising underage guys, did the bastard diddle his own boys?" I can't be the only one who is thinking this. I know this is the memory of the one character and her experiences, but after so successfully using the brothers earlier it feels strange how they get dropped later. I felt like it needs to widen out and use the brothers more later on in the show: bring them back for another song or even just a reprise somehow, and even during the fleet week scene the boys could be given more.
The "Ring of Keys" number: no way in hell will this play to a larger audience. This made my skin crawl. Not because it describes anything unusual, but that a child actor is the one presenting the material. In a work of literature, you can have a child express these sorts of things and it feels ok because as the reader you know that it is the author speaking through the veil of childhood. In live theatre the author is using a real live human as a puppet, and you can't help wonder how this material may affect this child's psychology. That is the best I can come to describing my feelings. It felt wrong to me - as a gay man who started cruising as soon as he hit puberty - and I can't see this working for a wider audience.
While I am grateful to have had a chance to experience this, I would not list this among the best of the shows I saw this week. At the same time, I realize that my view is coming from an unusual experience. Most people will see maybe 1 show a week or in a smaller city you might be lucky to see one play a month, not 10 in a week. Instead of taking this to a bigger theatre in NY, I coulod see this as the type of things that does well in a scaled down production that tours or plays in regional productions by other similar non-profits houses. I could see this doing very well in a run San Francisco, or in shorter two weeks runs in the small theatres of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. No one would be making noise through the show to complain about the A/C in those cities either because everyone would be warm in their plaid shirts. ;P
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