Musicals as Self-Reflections

Midway through the second act of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, Carole’s friend and fellow songwriter Cynthia Weil proclaims that being in a taxi and hearing her song on the radio is more fulfilling than marriage could be, and predicts that she would lose half of herself were she to marry. In the 2010s, it was still surprising to see this kind of conversation between two women, privileging their professional lives, staged in a musical, an entertainment form where women are more commonly defined by their relationships with men. Though Weil did eventually marry her songwriting partner, Barry Mann, it was not at the expense of her career. A jukebox musical, Beautiful showcases Carole King’s song catalog (and some of Weil’s) but also chronicles King’s life through her 1960s girlhood, anticipating the impact she would have as a singer-songwriter through the 1970s and beyond with albums like Tapestry. The musical charts the emergence of a liberated American woman, placing her self-esteem, body image, marriage, motherhood, and independence center stage in a way rarely seen on the musical theatre stage. Beyond discussing the music industry and their careers, Weil and King discuss the latter’s young children, and in conversations with her mother, Genie Klein, throughout the musical, King also discusses music and her ambitions. With multiple female characters who talk to each other about more than men, Beautiful passes the Bechdel–Wallace test, a set of conditions used to establish whether a work shows female agency and independence.

Lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel is credited with introducing “the Bechdel test” in 1985, in her comic Dykes to Watch Out For, to evaluate women’s presence and agency in films. Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace with the idea for the test, which Bechdel’s comic character introduced as a rule for deciding whether or not to see a film. The test became widely used to evaluate gender bias in a range of cultural texts, with the results cataloged on websites such as bechdeltest.com and “Theatre That Passes the Bechdel Test.”Footnote ² Bechdel went on to publish Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a graphic novel “that also travels an important historical trajectory in relation to gay and lesbian civil rights in American culture.”Footnote ³ The title Fun Home is taken from the time Bechdel spent as a child in her family’s funeral home, where some of the musical’s scenes are set (Fig. 1), but we also witness Alison at college and at work as a professional artist.

Figure 1. Sydney Lucas (right) as Small Alison, and Beth Malone as Alison in the musical Fun Home, at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, 26 March 2015. Photo: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux.

Not only have these American icons inspired feminist musicals, thereby expanding women’s presence in musical theatre storytelling, but the feminist biographical musical genre is also using musical theatre to expand feminist historiography. The grounding of female-centered storytelling in women’s history, like feminism’s longstanding deployment of history, may also be doing significant labor in dismantling the theatre industry’s patriarchy. “The performance of history is not usually held up as a legitimate mode of historiography,” theatre historian Charlotte Canning notes, “But performance can demonstrate aspects of and ideas about history that are less possible in print. It can encourage considerations of the gestural, the emotional, the aural, the visual, and the physical in ways beyond print’s ability to evoke or understand them.”Footnote ⁴ As this article explores, musical theatre writing and performance are particularly effective at engaging audiences with history in the ways Canning identifies. Using their own songs and cartoons as primary sources in the musical theatre staging of King’s and Bechdel’s personal histories captures not only the facts of women’s shifting status in American society, but also the feelings associated with the shifts each woman lived through.

Most musicals are adaptations of some kind; indeed, the hit musicals centering girls and women that ran simultaneously on Broadway with Beautiful and Fun Home, including Matilda (2013), and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella (2013), are adaptations of literary and screen sources. The Color Purple (2005), based on Alice Walker’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film, centered a queer Black woman who survives years of abuse to become an entrepreneur. The novel was adapted by playwright Marsha Norman and songwriters Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray. Its return to Broadway in a 2015 revival hints at the dearth of musicals representing women’s strength and potential beyond marriage, and may have signaled an opportunity for more musicals based on female-authored source material and stagings of women’s desires and feelings outside of the conventions of heteronormativity.

Commissioned by New York magazine, Bechdel created cartoon panels depicting her response to the musical adaptation of her life, and the panels were also reproduced in the souvenir program for Fun Home on Broadway. Beyond documenting the musical itself as a new part of her autobiography, Bechdel’s response, entitled “Play therapy,” acknowledges how a musical theatre adaptation of her life functions. “I guess I had been expecting that a musical version of the book would be a bit artificial—a lighter, arms-length take on my childhood,” she recalls. “I was not prepared for the opposite impact.”Footnote ⁵ Calling the panels “Play therapy” and noting the musical had an “impact” begin to reveal how actively engaged Bechdel was by Fun Home, and that the musical itself was doing something for the people in its audience. “It seemed to get to the emotional heart of things more directly than my book had. And certainly more directly than my parents and I ever had in real life,” Bechdel concludes.Footnote ⁶

While Bechdel’s life as adapted by the musical also encompasses her parents’ marriage, her closeted father’s homosexuality, and his presumed death by suicide, and thereby offers audiences access to those emotional experiences, Kron and Tesori importantly succeeded in getting to the heart of Bechdel’s gender identity and sexuality. As Tesori declared in her acceptance speech upon making history with Kron as the first women to win the Tony Award for Best Original Score, “I didn’t realize a career in music was available to women until 1981. I saw the magnificent Linda Twine conduct A Lady and Her Music: Lena Horne and that was my ‘Ring of Keys’ moment, which by the way is not a song of love, it’s a song of identification because for girls you have to see it to be it.”Footnote ⁷ Kron received a second Tony for Best Book of a Musical, and Fun Home was also awarded Best Musical.

In addition to showing girls and women how King and Bechdel’s lives unfolded as they became successful, creative women, these musicals provide audiences with access to the feelings girls and women have as they make personal and professional journeys. Theatre scholar Kelsey Blair discusses “how affect is produced and circulated by the combination of artistic elements in empowerment song and dance numbers,” and how such numbers become the primary point of affective connection between audiences and what’s happening onstage.Footnote ⁸ Blair discusses the thrilling act 1 finales “Defying Gravity” in Wicked (2003) and “One Day More” in Les Misérables (1985), both literary adaptations, but in this article I apply Blair’s theory of affect to thrilling and affective musical theatre moments inspired by real women’s life stories.

While King and Bechdel’s creative outputs are already emotionally rich, and thus lend themselves to musical theatre adaptation, musical theatre as a form depends on an excess of emotion that demands expression through such an interdisciplinary outlet. Beautiful and Fun Home thus have the potential, as musicals, to offer an even more emotional experience than attending a Carole King concert or reading an Alison Bechdel graphic novel. As critic Francine Prose observed of Fun Home, “Things that are understood and understated in the memoir are given additional drama and intensity on stage. At the risk of stating the obvious: there is an enormous difference in how we respond to a character if we are looking at a cartoon or watching a human being.”Footnote ⁹ Learning from King and Bechdel’s amplified and expanded lives, live, may affect audiences in more complex ways than solitary, asynchronous listening or reading.

When compared to spoken drama, book scenes in musicals are brief and efficient, “relinquishing to the songs much of the development of character and theme typically found in a play’s dialogue,” musical theatre scholar Brian Valencia explains. “In exchange, music and song considerably expand the range of expressive possibilities conventionally available to realistic spoken drama.”Footnote ¹⁰ Building on Valencia, this article explores the functionality of musical theatre as an affective influence on gender norms and establishes how these musicals challenge the musical theatre industry’s conventions for telling real women’s stories.

Women and Musical Theatre in the Early Twenty-first Century

Because Fun Home was staged in the round on Broadway, the audience watched both the musical and each other, further intensifying the experience as a communal one, resolved by a standing ovation.Footnote ¹¹ Beautiful’s audiences sang along and gasped as they recognized songs throughout the musical, culminating with a standing ovation and singalong of “I Feel the Earth Move.”Footnote ¹² That these audiences’ affective, communal experience, intensified at Beautiful as a result of singing along further establishes these two musicals’ exceptional achievements in engaging musical theatre audiences with feminist historiography. Such an affective, communal experience has subsequently united spectators with the female-centered storytelling of the bio-musicals On Your Feet!:The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan (2015), Tina: The Tina Turner Musical (2018), Summer: The Donna Summer Musical (2018), and The Cher Show (2018)—all of which deploy women’s creative careers, through the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, and, with varying degrees of success, break the fourth wall to engage audiences with their heroines’ struggles and triumphs.

Beautiful and Fun Home predate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the flurry of women’s bio-musicals that followed her defeat reinforce the significance of centering and sustaining women’s presence on major public stages in the 2010s. In 2013, while Fun Home was running Off-Broadway and just weeks before Beautiful began previews on Broadway, feminist theorist bell hooks commented, “In recent years, discussions of feminism have not evoked animated passion in audiences. We were far more likely to hear that we are living in a post-feminist society than to hear voices clamoring to learn more about feminism.”Footnote ¹³ hooks could have been reflecting on the field of contemporary musical theatre, where Alison and Carole joined the male heroes of Broadway’s juggernauts Aladdin (2014), The Book of Mormon (2011), Dear Evan Hansen (2016), and Hamilton (2015), musicals making limited efforts to engage audiences with feminism. Indeed, it was only in 2017 that Disney began sponsoring an annual Women’s Day on Broadway. Alison and Carole’s chief female peers were Matilda, and Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked—fictional young women with magical powers, removed from any past or present feminist reality.

The most successful jukebox musical to date, Mamma Mia! (1999, 2001), is popular with women of all ages and tells the story of Sophie, a young bride-to-be trying to establish who her father is, so that he can walk her down the aisle at her wedding. Catherine Johnson’s libretto reveals little of Sophie’s past, her personal interests, education, or career goals. Her mother, Donna, a former girl-group star and a successful entrepreneur, reunites with her former bandmates and spends much of the musical contemplating an old flame. Despite her admirable self-sufficiency, the musical alternates between framing Donna as a mother and as a potential lover. To be sure, Mamma Mia! is a feel-good musical, written, directed, and produced by women, using much-loved ABBA tunes as a platform for female bonding. In only partially representing its female characters’ lives, its potential to impact female spectators intellectually or affectively beyond an entertaining girls’ night seems limited.

In the introduction to her 2011 monograph, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical, Stacy Wolf notes that “Gender is a constitutive element of Broadway musical theatre, fundamental to the musical’s architecture,” and its meaning and use in musicals has changed over the past fifty years.Footnote ¹⁴ Wolf privileges Wicked and its powerful girl witches, as a positive rearrangement of women’s roles and representations. Theatre scholar Jill Dolan also notes how “more women have ascended to higher political office,” and how “the political situation of predominantly white, middle-class, college-educated women has changed over the last twenty-five years.”Footnote ¹⁵ But, like Wicked in the decades since its Broadway opening, “these women remain exceptional. American culture’s paucity of imagination about how to represent the full diversity of women’s experience reminds us of their singularity much too frequently.”Footnote ¹⁶ Though 68 percent of Broadway and West End audiences are female, they have had a very limited choice of musicals reflecting either their history, or their present.Footnote ¹⁷ During the years Beautiful and Fun Home ran on Broadway, only about a third of the musicals onstage centered women,Footnote ¹⁸ and “While gay men have long been a part of the production and reception of American musicals, lesbians have emphatically not—at least not visibly.”Footnote ¹⁹ Outnumbered as Bechdel and King’s bio-musicals have been by young men on adventures, girls with magical powers, or the power of ABBA, the success of musicals representing real women like Bechdel and King struggling and thriving (rather than larger-than-life divas belting), is not surprising. The growing number of bio-musicals that continue to tell real women’s stories confirm their efficacy, and historicizing such a trend demonstrates why changing the musical’s major to real women accomplishes more than simply entertaining the majority segment of musical theatre audiences.

Where the Real Girls Have Been: Earlier Biographical Musicals Centering Women

Several biographical musicals from Broadway’s so-called Golden Age opened on the cusp of second-wave feminism and are useful for understanding how richly and powerfully the musical can tell a real woman’s life story, even if musical theatre creators have not consistently committed themselves to such subjects. While feminism was not their central agenda, these musicals’ titles either named or referred to the biography’s subject, and together they established the potential musicals like Fun Home and Beautiful more fully realized. These earlier biographical musicals typically introduce their leading character as a girl, and depict her training or professionalization, sometimes with the involvement of her mother. Her romances, marriage, and own motherhood are also represented. More broadly, she is often framed like a pinball of energy and ambition, ricocheting off men and institutions that preserve the patriarchy.

The biographical musical Gypsy (1959) begins and concludes with Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother, Rose Hovick, taking center stage—at the beginning to command men to support her young daughters’ performance, and in the finale, surveying her life and the goals she failed to achieve. Much of the musical shows her daughters, June Havoc and Lee, banding together to survive their mother’s whims and life as vaudeville performers. Subtitled “a musical fable,” Gypsy’s moral lesson may have been to caution women who, at the end of the 1950s, might imagine alternatives for themselves and their children outside of conventional marriage and family life. The musical’s final moment is of a mother and daughter, an alternative, in 1959, to finales uniting nuclear families or romantic couples.

Mothers and daughters were onstage together again in 1964’s Funny Girl. “Who taught her everything she knows?” Mrs. Brice sings, taking some of the credit for her daughter Fanny’s skill and talent as she begins to make her way in show business. When contrasted to Annie Get Your Gun (1946), we can read Fanny Brice’s bio-musical as a slightly more progressive contribution to feminist historiography. Beyond telling the stories of real American women, these two midcentury musicals are also among the very few with any female authorship—Dorothy Fields having coauthored Annie Get Your Gun’s libretto with her brother Herbert, while Isobel Lennart penned Funny Girl’s book. Both Annie Oakley and Fanny Brice are introduced as energetic girls in need of coaching from eager men, prior to the young women’s debuts on major public stages. Annie and Fanny demonstrate their professional abilities but also sing about old-fashioned weddings and wanting to be seen with a man. Professional compromises to keep male partners in their lives follow.

While Annie Get Your Gun concludes with her decision to marry Frank and collaborate professionally, Fanny is alone, singing a reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” rewriting her past desire for a relationship with the new possibilities she has, and unconventionally both in Fanny’s time and in 1964, as a single mother. Decades later, Carole King (another single mother) would sing solo, center stage, about being beautiful—an echo, perhaps to Fanny’s “Hey, gorgeous, here we go again.”Footnote ²⁰ Though Ethel Merman as Annie and Barbra Streisand as Fanny would leave no spectator in doubt of her independence and self-reliance, the musicals in which they starred invited the titular characters to acquiesce to the patriarchy, whether in work or in marriage, and were not advocating that female spectators claim any greater agency in their own lives.

Fanny Brice and other leading ladies of the 1960s “represent varying degrees of empowered independence, but within their historical contexts they are unable to engage directly with any restlessness felt by American women in the mid-1960s.”Footnote ²¹ Like Gypsy in 1959, Funny Girl chronicles the 1920s and 1930s. Annie Oakley’s bio-musical looks even further back into history, covering the late nineteenth century in her 1946 musical, while another bio-musical, 1960’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown, surveys socialite Margaret Brown’s adventures through the early twentieth century. “Through its peculiar mode of representation, opera tests and expands our notion of what properly belongs to that domain we label history,” Herbert Lindenberger writes, and midcentury bio-musicals similarly advocated for these women’s inclusion in history.Footnote ²²

Elaine Aston acknowledges men’s dominance of theatrical power structures, and suggests that to change the kind of theatre being produced, “A more radical re-assessment of society’s organizational structure is required: one which deconstructs patriarchal dominance and advocates the primacy of women’s position.”Footnote ²³ Though Micki Grant, Gretchen Cryer, and Nancy Ford used musical theatre to engage with contemporary feminism, and sometimes drew from biography or autobiography, “they did not develop an enduring commercial presence as musical theatre authors.”Footnote ²⁴ Beyond the so-called Golden Age, male writers, composers, directors, and producers occasionally selected real women’s lives as the subject of major musicals. Broadway became the runway for fashion icon Coco Chanel’s biography in Coco (1969), created as a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn. Thanks to Maureen Dallas Watkins’s journalism and playwriting in the 1920s, murder suspects Beulah Annan and Belvah Gaertner became Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly in Chicago (1975). Tazeena Firth codesigned sets and costumes and was the only woman on the creative team of Evita (1978, 1979), the bio-musical staging the life of Argentina’s first lady Eva Peron, first produced in London and then on Broadway. In Austria, a bio-musical modeled after Evita brought the life of nineteenth-century Habsburg empress Elisabeth to the stage in 1992 and became wildly popular in East Asia. The Last Empress musical, about Korea’s Empress Myeongseong, premiered in Seoul in 1995. In Japan, Marie Antoinette premiered in 2006, followed by Lady Bess (2014), about Elizabeth I in her youth.

On Broadway, Grey Gardens (2006) and War Paint (2017) bookended Beautiful and Fun Home. Grey Gardens chronicles the lives of the eccentric American socialites “Big” and “Little” Edie Bouvier Beale in 1941 and 1973. War Paint also tells a pair of real women’s stories, those of cosmetic giants Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. These musicals’ development at well-regarded venues such as Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and the casting of such beloved musical theatre performers as Christine Ebersole and Patti LuPone, may have burnished them; but running 307 and 236 performances, respectively, neither Grey Gardens nor War Paint resonated sufficiently with musical theatre’s majority female audience to achieve serious commercial success. Neither show achieved a national tour, limiting any further circulation of the women’s biographies they staged. Running 2,416 performances on Broadway and spending nearly six years on tour, Beautiful engaged audiences with King’s biography more successfully than other musicals discussed here. While its creative team is similarly all male, the redeployment of King’s song catalog anchors her voice in the storytelling. Fun Home’s more modest 583 performances still made history with the musical’s five Tony Awards and Tesori and Kron’s collaboration.

Writing and Performing Carole King

Douglas McGrath, writer and director of literary film adaptations such as Emma (1996) and Nicholas Nickleby (2002), suggested that “The bulk of her [King’s] fans … they think she was born, she learned to walk, and she recorded Tapestry. That’s what they know about her.”Footnote ²⁵ McGrath highlighted the truncated timeline that he was tasked with expanding when he was recruited to write the script for Beautiful. The show works to connect, “the real life of the people… with the music so that the music is the ultimate expression of what’s happening in the scenes,” McGrath explains. “They don’t sing the songs to each other the way they do in Rodgers and Hammerstein but we know in the audience when we hear the song sung that he wrote it and she wrote it and it represents something in their lives.”Footnote ²⁶ For King, such a musical makes sense because “musicals were a major influence on my songwriting.”Footnote ²⁷ When she first met Goffin, she agreed to compose the music for a Broadway musical he wanted to write, if he wrote lyrics for her rock songs. Because those songs became so popular, a Broadway musical “never came to fruition,” but as King observes, “Now that our songs have merged with a Broadway show, we’ve come full circle.”Footnote ²⁸ Her admission of Broadway’s influence on her songwriting, and identification of a “merger,” rather than describing a musical based on or presenting her songs, reinforces the presence of musical theatre craft in Beautiful and the storytelling in King’s songs. As the first actor to play Carole, Jessie Mueller explained, “It’s not at all a jukebox musical…. The story is beautifully woven throughout so that it’s very organic. You see where she is in her life when she writes these songs, and that will stay with you.”Footnote ²⁹

To signal the musical’s use of King’s songs for telling her history, Beautiful begins with King at a piano on the stage at Carnegie Hall in 1971, playing and singing “So Far Away,” a song about distance and traveling from one place in time to the next. The song works like a key to collapse time and unlock King’s past. A set change reveals King’s 1950s Brooklyn home, with her mother, Genie, at the piano. Sixteen-year-old Carole runs on to try a new song opening on the piano, and explains to her mother, “When I hear a good song, I feel like someone understands me. Even if I’m all alone I feel like I have a friend in the world. I want to do that for people!”Footnote ³⁰ Her first step is getting her mother’s permission to travel into Manhattan to pitch her song to music publishers at 1650 Broadway, a hive of music industry activity.

Carole turns on American Bandstand to prove to her mother that her own song is better than whatever is playing. Neil Sedaka, a high school classmate Carole dated, is onscreen singing “Oh! Carol,” his response to their short-lived relationship. Her mother consents and Carole is soon Manhattan-bound, her song in hand, as the next scene change reveals the cubicles of 1650 Broadway from which a medley of songs emerges. Both the structure of these opening scenes and the attention to detail invite the audience to experience multiple chapters from history, chronicling King’s 1971 Carnegie Hall debut that recognized her prowess as a singer-songwriter; her adolescence and Brooklyn roots; and the specificity of the late 1950s in rock and roll, signaled by the interpolation of both American Bandstand and 1650 Broadway.Footnote ³¹

McGrath, the bookwriter, conducted interviews with King and her ex-husband Gerry Goffin, and their friends and rivals, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, so to a certain degree, Beautiful might be more usefully compared to a documentary musical like A Chorus Line (1975) or Come from Away (2017) than to jukebox musicals that insert a song catalog into a fictional story, such as Mamma Mia! The musical itself, through Derek McLane’s scenic design, foregrounds its functionality as a container of history. The set opens and expands to reveal the structure of the building at 1650 Broadway, containing multiple laboring songwriters and performers, including a range of women. The musical thus announces itself as a repository of their stories. Both inside this industrial structure and in more domestic settings, Carole and other women reflect on their situations. “You’re a composer? You’re a girl,” Cynthia Weil remarks in one of the offices upon first meeting Carole.Footnote ³² Their publisher and producer, Don Kirshner, walks in on them at one point and asks, “Am I in the ladies room?”Footnote ³³ In these exchanges, Beautiful depicts King’s negotiation of the music industry as a young woman, and highlights the change of which she was a part as female songwriters became increasingly less incongruous to such music industry sites as the 1650 Broadway building.

Beautiful was developed over four years, including a reading in New York City in April 2013 and an out-of-town tryout in San Francisco, where San Jose Mercury News critic Karen D’Souza found McGrath’s book “doesn’t live up to the songs”—though in the stronger second act, “When the music seems to flow from the narrative, Beautiful is irresistible and vivid.” D’Souza highlighted the effectiveness of “It’s Too Late,” another time-conscious song like “So Far Away.” Carole introduces the song at the Greenwich Village club The Bitter End, and “You can hear the echoes between her life and her work. You can hear a legend being born.”Footnote ³⁴ When the musical opened on Broadway three months later, critics were united in their indifference toward McGrath’s “connect-the-dots story line”; the Daily News critic called it “so simplistic that the extravagantly talented King’s life emerges as a mundane version of the long-suffering little woman.”Footnote ³⁵ Musicals’ scripts are often deemed their weakest element when a new show premieres, but given Beautiful went on to entertain audiences for more than a decade (if combining the years on Broadway with its years on tour), what disappointed the critics may have facilitated such longevity. Simple stories can engage larger audiences, and a mundane presentation of King’s suffering may have invited audiences to connect more deeply to a character who shared their own workplace or relationship struggles.

Most critics focused instead on performer Mueller’s performance as King. “Ms. King is female,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley felt the need to point out, “and her evolution as a composer and performer, starting in the late 1950s, reflects the particular changes and conflicts for women then working in a world of men.”Footnote ³⁶ Brantley went on to compare McGrath’s mediocre jokes to Mamma Mia!’s corniness, only praising Mueller’s performance—“so touching is its projection of a lack of confidence.” But the audience knows, “that Carole will come into her glorious own after breaking off from her erratic and dominating husband,”Footnote ³⁷ Brantley observed, and he pointed to Mueller’s singing in particular. Regardless of his dismissal of the script, Brantley was affectively connecting to King because of actor Jessie Mueller’s singing. Reviewing Katie Brayben in the 2016 London production, Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish demonstrated the historical empathy outlined above, writing how, “Something new was born; King went from being a school-girl, brimming with innocence and ideas, to a mature mother who could no longer just service other stars but had to assert a voice of her own.”Footnote ³⁸ While McGrath’s script may have its weaknesses, recirculating this “something new” from King, her assertive female voice, live in a musical, also meant that something new happened in musical theatre.

Writing and Performing Alison Bechdel

Fun Home was developed over a five-year period in which the composer Tesori and book writer Kron participated in playwriting conferences and laboratories around the United States before settling in for two years of readings and workshops at the Off-Broadway Public Theater, where the musical opened in 2013 and became a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. With a performance art pedigree accrued since the 1980s at East Village venues such as P.S. 122 and La MaMa, Kron, a playwright, was well known for her one-woman, autobiographical plays. Lesbian sexuality was normal and unquestioned in the nonlinear and imaginative work Kron admired, by performers and troupes such as Holly Hughes and Split Britches. Kron went on to put herself and her family onstage, eventually writing Well (2004), about her relationship with her mother but explored through a play within a play. Although Fun Home was her first musical, she was well-equipped to adapt the story of a closeted gay father and his lesbian cartoonist daughter. Tesori, a composer, had previously contributed additional songs to Thoroughly Modern Millie (2002) and Shrek the Musical (2008, with its small, medium, and adult Fionas), but had also written the musicals Caroline, or Change (2004), about an African-American maid working for a Jewish family in 1960s Louisiana, and Violet (1997), also set in the 1960s, which told the story of a young disfigured woman hoping to be healed by a televangelist.

As at Beautiful, Brantley had an affective experience at Fun Home, opening his review of the Off-Broadway premiere by explaining, “At moments during Fun Home, the beautiful heartbreaker of a musical that opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, you may feel you’ve developed quadruple vision, and not just because your eyes are misted with tears. It’s also a matter of those three actresses playing the same character at different ages, a device that usually feels strained in theater, but here comes off as naturally as breathing.”Footnote ³⁹ Comparing the casting device of Small, Medium, and adult Alisons to breathing, Brantley acknowledged how a particular element of the musical established his emotional connection to the main character of Alison Bechdel, a strong enough connection that he may have cried. Like Jessie Mueller in Beautiful, Brantley found Beth Malone as the adult Alison to be self-effacing, both their performances inviting the critic and audience to connect emotionally.

In London in 2018, critic Franciska Éry noted “a sense of natural ease” in the cast of Fun Home at the Young Vic Theatre. She admitted, “one often forgets they are watching a musical.” She also observed the audience’s affective response: “We are with Alison every step of the way, and you can feel the tangible buzz in the auditorium: after every song the audience gives a thunderous applause.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As noted by these critics, whether the multiplication of a character or a natural acting style, theatrical devices helped to stimulate an affective response that made Fun Home more than live entertainment for its audiences. Theatre scholar Erin Hurley notes that while the spectator’s experience of a performance is subjective, we can read one another’s expression of an affective response: “Thus affect exceeds us thrice over. First, it exceeds us in the sense that it is beyond our control. Second, it is not unique to the individual but is common to the species. . . . And third, affect exceeds us in the sense that it may be communicated via emotional display.”Footnote ⁴¹ The critics cited here documented emotional displays common to more than one Fun Home spectator, and whether tears or thunderous applause, the expression could not be restrained.

Musicologist Kay Norton suggests that “any shared song repertoire, from blues to grand opera, can bind together, organize, identify, and uplift the people who enjoy it. Songs can encourage solidarity, help distinguish one group from another, and reinforce defining principles of what is important in life. Especially in times of social uncertainty, shared songs can manage social relationships.”Footnote ⁴² The uplift audiences feel when they experience songs in Fun Home or Beautiful as part of a group supports their reception of Bechdel’s and King’s biographies. Songs help to distinguish each woman as a representative of her gender, and privilege their experiences and creative output as worthy of the gathered audience’s esteem.

An Affect for Equality

It is no accident that both musicals emerged, and thrived, during periods of debate and protest over marriage equality and women’s presence in contemporary society. In bringing together audiences, each musical may have helped to foster solidarity and reinforce women’s rights. Norton notes that “scientists now know that the human mirror neuron system makes it possible for performers and their listeners to share a neurological resonance. That new knowledge intensifies singing’s tremendous potential to create better understanding and, perhaps, slightly new solutions to old problems.”Footnote ⁴³ Both musicals, then, used their songs to connect audiences with those women’s experiences. By representing old problems for women in constructing identity, asserting themselves, and flourishing (especially the problems of second-wave feminism in the 1970s that had not yet been sufficiently documented by musical theatre), Fun Home and Beautiful made Bechdel and King accessible as guides for contemporary audiences grappling with women’s still unequal social and political status.

While these ideas and experiences might also be transmitted by Bechdel’s graphic novels and King’s albums, “Theatre is bigger than life precisely because its emotional repertoire is bigger than our quotidian one.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Reading or listening to recorded music is a more quotidian habit than theatregoing, and as Hurley explains, “emotional highs and lows are not generally experienced offstage at such close intervals or at such extremes”Footnote ⁴⁵ as in the theatre. The intensity of musical theatre songs ensured the highs and lows in Beautiful and Fun Home were even more extreme for their audiences, though both musicals achieved this with representations of the quotidian in Alison and Carole’s lives. Hair brushing and homework have not previously been the stuff of musical theatre milestones, but such details from girls’ lives ground their histories, and establish a contrast with the emotional highs of singing.

Until Now Gives Way to Then: Fracturing the Bechdel Family Narrative

In her foreword to the published libretto, Kron observes that Bechdel’s graphic novel “feels like a traditional narrative that starts with her childhood and progresses through a linear story; but a closer reading reveals the book is actually a recursive meditation. . . . And yet the graphic novel makes us feel like we’re moving forward in time.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Brantley had a similarly complex experience of time when watching the musical during its Off Broadway run. The set, costume, lighting, and projection elements, he suggested, “ingeniously keep us both fixed in time and afloat in timelessness.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such observations attest both to the lingering presence of Bechdel’s girlhood in her adult life and to the musical’s achievement in being able to convey a woman’s experience of her past in her present.

No stranger to writing songs for complicated women in historical settings, Tesori, as Brantley noted in his review, made witty use of the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, the decades in which Alison grows up, and “layers contrapuntal voices to evoke every family’s aspirations to complete harmony and the impossibility of achieving it.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But songs were not the only way into Bechdel’s life. “We needed to find a theatrical analogy to the way Alison was telling her story,” the director Sam Gold recalls.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kron thus used the adult Alison in the process of drawing cartoons, to shift and direct the narrative. “Caption: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town /And he was gay. And I was gay, And he killed himself. And I became a lesbian cartoonist.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Lighting designer Ben Stanton created cartoon squares of light, projected on the stage floor, further drawing the audience into Alison’s creative process and perspective.

Memory plays and musicals, like Fun Home, “make specific art out of the ways we heighten and distort the view over our shoulders,” wrote Brantley. Parents like Alison’s father, Bruce, consequently feel “both larger than life and ineffably true to it,” and potentially remind spectators of their own personal memories.Footnote ⁵¹ Fun Home’s authors’ added challenge, then, beyond adapting and staging the facts of Alison’s life and the historical context through which she lived, was also to reveal Alison’s own perspective on her history. When Small Alison attempts to draw a map without her father’s interference, adult Alison tries to empower her younger self: “Try laying out a bird’s eye view / Not what he told you, just what you see / What do you know that’s not your dad’s mythology?”Footnote ⁵² The actress Judy Kuhn, who created the role of Alison’s mother, Helen, suggested the musical “has an emotional chronology that’s different from the time chronology.”Footnote ⁵³ Small, medium, and adult Alison intersect with each other throughout the time-jumping musical, and yet Alison’s overall journey of negotiating her feelings toward her father and defining her own identity as a lesbian unfolds remarkably clearly and coherently.

Feelings about Families

While the 1960s and 1970s are embedded in Carole King’s song catalog, Fun Home composer Tesori channels a 1970s vibe, and both musicals welcome audiences with period aesthetics. Songs from both musicals combine a range of musical theatre elements to establish affective connections as well as historical empathy, as each woman deals with multiple crises, in the context of the larger social and political crises of the 1960s and 1970s. Hurley identifies social work in theatre’s emotional labor, “by this I mean that via emotional labour, theatre intervenes in how we as a society come to understand ourselves, our values, and our social world.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Alison’s father’s homosexual trysts are depicted as a challenge to stability in the Bechdel family house on Maple Avenue, but might also be read as part of a broader challenge to the nuclear family in 1970s America. Carole King, divorcing her husband and parenting her children as a single mother, was similarly offering new ways of thinking about family and her identity as a woman.

In No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, Natasha Zaretsky explains how in the 1970s, “Sexuality emerged as a profoundly disturbing and liberating force. Countercultural critiques of American society and the quest for authenticity often went hand in hand with visible redefinitions of masculinity and femininity. Youth was posed against age, protest against obedience, authenticity against conformity, and freedom against authority.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Both musicals show each woman’s struggle to accept an alternative or fragmented sense of family, but also the challenges they offer within their respective families as they seek to redefine their gender identities.

Though Small Alison challenges her father’s wish that she wear dresses and style her hair in a particular way, when her parents are fighting, she imagines a happier family in the song “Raincoat of Love.” “Our happy life seemed far away and everything was made of lies,”Footnote ⁵⁶ a sparkly costumed singer croons after emerging from a trap door into the Bechdels’ living room. Dry ice helps to establish the song as Alison’s fantasy; she spots her father, and, Partridge Family style, everyone sings, “Everything’s alright, babe, when we’re togethah / Cuz you are like a raincoat made out of love.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Later in the musical, Alison’s mother, Helen, sings “Days and Days,” a song about putting up with her husband’s homosexual affairs and trying to be a wife and mother. She sings about “days made of bargains I made because I thought as a wife / I was meant to and now my life is shattered and laid bare.” She finishes by insisting to Medium Alison, home from college, that she break the mold and exert a claim to the time making up the rest of her life: “Don’t you come back here / I didn’t raise you / to give away your days / like me.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The real Alison Bechdel followed through on her mother’s caution as depicted in the musical, becoming an artist and circulating her work for public consumption, capturing and captioning her lesbian perspective on life. Rather than disappearing into any gender norms, she helped define new ones.

As a high school student early on in Beautiful, Carole King suggests that life begins with marriage and a move to the suburbs—but the musical shows us that it is in fact her talent and success as a hit songwriter that provide the wherewithal for her to move to the suburbs, not her precarious marriage. Carole confesses she is sure of herself at work, but less so at home—a reversal of so many popular culture depictions of women in the workplace dropping pens, speaking awkwardly, and lacking competence. “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” written by Goffin and a twenty-five-year-old King and recorded by the Monkees in 1967, starts to unravel the dream of domestic bliss King once had—houses look the same, status symbols are more valued than people. In the musical, the song is sung by Goffin, King, and her mother in a hospital scene following Goffin’s breakdown. He promises to end the affair he’s having and join the family in the suburbs. But in the subsequent suburban scene we see just how unstable the marriage has become despite their having children and a home. Later when pushed to sing at the Greenwich Village club the Bitter End, Carole sings “It’s Too Late,” a song with music by King and lyrics by Toni Stern. Like Alison’s mother, Helen, King sings about having tried to make a relationship work by faking it, but unlike Helen, Carole’s song implies it is the woman who ended the relationship. In the musical, it serves as a bridge to Carole’s next step in becoming a singer-songwriter and ultimately recording the album Tapestry.

As Beautiful or As Handsome As You Feel

Carole gets it right, as Don Kirshner, her producer, observes: “You’re a girl and you sing girl songs.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Historian Judy Kutulas explains how “King represented a kind of ideal counterculture woman, and Tapestry invited young women to define their own safe, comfortable spaces within the evolving counterculture ideal.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Tapestry, like Beautiful, was a very mainstream album that marketed women’s possibilities without offending other audiences. The musical and the album are apolitical while celebrating Carole’s articulation of gender difference. Though heterosexual and lesbian, King and Bechdel both came out as nonconforming women. Kutulas explains how King’s “personal story illustrated the way women’s lives suddenly opened up.”Footnote ⁶¹ Tapestry and the 1971 Carnegie Hall concert that concludes the musical Beautiful finalize King’s emergence as a liberated American woman, and thus she sings in the musical’s title song (Fig. 2), “You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile on your face / And show the world all the love in your heart. / Then people gonna treat you better / You’re gonna find, yes you will / That you’re beautiful as you feel.”Footnote ⁶² Feeling, King articulated, is how women know themselves, and sharing women’s feelings in a Broadway musical is an important document of the power of women’s feelings through history. “In addition to being theatre’s reason for being, feeling is what is most consequential about theatre,”Footnote ⁶³ Hurley points out. Because Carole feels all her experiences so deeply, and expresses them with such consequence, to a certain extent she, and her songs, belong in a musical.

Figure 2. Jessie Mueller as Carole King performs the title song in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical at the Sondheim Theatre in New York, 20 November 2013. Photo: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux.

In an earlier scene Carole observes a curvy, attractive peer, remarking that she has all the same body parts but the wrong organization. Later, anxious about an unplanned pregnancy as an unmarried teenager, she laments that she will have gotten pregnant and married, in the wrong order.Footnote ⁶⁴ Carole’s description of her body and personal milestones as wrong again express the musical’s awareness of her status as a force of change; sitting in the theatre in the 2010s audiences knew there was little wrong with her body, or the order in which she became pregnant and married, but these expressions of insecurity helped connect theatregoers with her narrative. We might have even longed to let her know that it is thanks to women like her that we go through life more confidently with wrongly organized bodies, making mistakes and experiencing life’s milestones in different orders.Footnote ⁶⁵

Upon winning the Tony Award for her performance, Mueller addressed King: “You have taught me so much. You teach me so much every night I get to go up onstage and try to go through what you went through and come out of it with kindness and love and forgiveness and a pure heart.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Like Mueller’s awareness of her learning through performing, audiences who watch and hear Carole persist might “visualize and perhaps even experience a new reality for a while. At the very least, imagining resolution helps reframe the status quo. Such visualization aided by singing might activate the mirror neuron system and motivate creative efforts to keep the oxytocin flowing.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Beautiful audiences responded initially through applause, ovation, singing along, the purchase of souvenirs, or a visit to the stage door. Some might return to see the show again. More significant, if motivated by the new reality they experienced in the theatre, they may have altered their social behavior regarding gender difference. As Dolan notes, building on Victor Turner, spectators temporarily gathered in a theatre are encouraged “to be active in other public spheres, to participate in civic conversations that performance perhaps begins.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Theatre scholar Joanna Mansbridge similarly observes that the history Fun Home adapts “is at once personal and collective” and that as “recollected historical material [it] makes possible other futures.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Spectators at both musicals may have thus caused change in their personal and professional lives, carrying on the social work begun by the musical.

As Carole finally gets to feel beautiful, Alison learns to feel handsome. In Fun Home Small Alison needs an example of gender nonconformity to help her understand her emerging lesbian identity and to define her femininity on her own terms, not her father’s. A turning point comes early in her life, but relatively late in the musical, as she sees a butch lesbian for the first time. As one critic noted, “This Alison doesn’t know quite what’s happening inside her, but she understands that it makes her feel free, happy and oddly complete.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While Small Alison’s blue jeans and confident presence throughout this song are already hinting at her potential to follow a different path from her mother, Sydney Lucas’s performance and Jeanine Tesori’s music help us to respond affectively, and with Lisa Kron’s very specific lyrics, perhaps even to empathize with the idea of being different: “Your swagger and your bearing / and the just-right clothes you’re wearing / Your short hair and your dungarees and your lace up boots / and your keys.”Footnote ⁷¹ The role model is manifest only through Kron’s dialogue and lyrics, and Lucas’s performance of her character’s gaze and affect. Alison knows how identity is constructed, and this moment in Fun Home recruits us not only to see her perspective, but also to feel her fulfillment from gaining access to an alternative. Mansbridge concurs, observing, “Want turns into recognition, and lesbian identification is powerfully embodied by this young girl and felt by the audience.”Footnote ⁷² Adult Alison’s gaze at her younger self during this moment reinforces the lifelong impact of witnessing an alternative construction of gender identity.

But the construction of her lesbian identity takes several more years, and it is Medium Alison who leaps out of the closet while at university. “I’m / Changing my major to Joan / I’m changing my major to sex with Joan,” she declares, after falling for a student in the gay union and having sex for the first time.Footnote ⁷³ Kron’s lyrics describing Alison’s desire and the physical experience of sex with Joan might provoke an affective response from the audience, as might the staging of the scene, with Alison in her underwear, singing in her dorm room and responding to the body of the lesbian in her bed. Just as Carole King put her personal experiences on Tapestry for public consumption, here Kron and Tesori publicize Bechdel’s personal experience of her first sexual encounter. “I’m dizzy I’m nauseous I’m shaky I’m scared,”Footnote ⁷⁴—these are not sensations exclusive to lesbians or cartoonists but are the feelings Kron asks audiences to recall as a way to connect with Alison in this moment. Alison’s “uncontrollable, skin-level registration of a change to [her] environment”Footnote ⁷⁵ is the kind of affective response Hurley discusses. For theatre spectators but also all humans, “Affect is unruly that way; it exceeds us by happening against our will. It is also arguably a common level of human response.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Having Alison share her affective response to sex with Joan reminds the audience she is as human as they, unable to control her response to a momentous experience, just as they may be unable to control their responses to the musical.

Carole King married Gerry Goffin because she was pregnant, and sex figures prominently throughout Beautiful. “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” with music by King and lyrics by Goffin, allows a woman to contemplate the consequences of sex. The song is reprised several times throughout the show, including after her marriage has ended because of her husband’s infidelities. But King also sings “I Feel the Earth Move,” with lyrics such as “my emotions are something I just can’t tame,”Footnote ⁷⁷ not unlike Alison’s postcoital exuberance. In the 1970s, Wolf reminds us, “Women were allowed to and even encouraged to have and express sexual desires, to be sexual agents rather than only passive recipients of male attention.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Carole, like Alison, increasingly finds her personal and professional identities collapsing and merging together—and these musicals do not try to tidy up any such blurring of boundaries. Alison’s cartoon captions and drawing table draw us into her artist’s world, just as Carole’s piano and 1650 Broadway office connect us to her songwriting career. They each experience professional success and personal growth simultaneously, and because “sung linguistic content can become memorable art,”Footnote ⁷⁹ the interdisciplinary elements of musical theatre craft facilitate deep engagement with these complicated experiences.

Being Carole, Being Alison

Joseph Roach probes effigies made of flesh, as the result of performances: “They consist of a set of actions that hold open a place in memory. A theatrical role, for instance, like a stone effigy on a tomb, has a certain longevity in time, but its special durability stems from the fact that it must be re-fleshed at intervals by the actors or actresses who step into it.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The stages where Beautiful and Fun Home are performed thus function as lieux de mémoire, staging moments of history torn from the movement of history. For the women playing Carole and Alison, the hairstyles and costumes that help them to reconstruct the iconic singer-songwriter and cartoonist are also the theatrical elements that help audiences to connect during the live performance, to access the feelings and ideas experienced and expressed by King and Bechdel.

These performers must also convey the Carole-ness of Carole King, the Alison-ness of Alison Bechdel, which are much more than a Brooklyn accent or a short haircut. Indeed, as Carole, Jessie Mueller was recognized with the Best Actress Tony Award, and Katie Brayben with London’s Olivier Award for Best Actress, while Beth Malone received a Tony nomination as Alison. Beautiful bookwriter McGrath insisted they are not impersonators. “For Carole to work as a character, it requires three things. She has to have a kind of self-deprecating humor and charm, she has to be able to break your heart when things go wrong for her, as they do in the story, and she has to sing.” King’s voice is too distinctive, McGrath suggests, to cast someone who sounds just like her, but he believes these actresses ultimately convey King’s essence—“you really believe you’re hearing Carole King,”Footnote ⁸¹ he says. Wall Street Journal reporter Stefanie Cohen reported on the casting of Carole, interviewing the musical’s director Marc Bruni who said “that playing a living person such as Carole King puts parameters on the role and in some ways protects the replacement actress. A lot of what the audience responds to … is Ms. King’s music and personality as much as the performance itself.”Footnote ⁸² Fun Home is similarly infused with Alison Bechdel. Emily Skeggs played Medium Alison on Broadway (Fig. 3) and explained, “We have Alison from the book and Alison from YouTube, and then we have our own perspective of Alison in real life…. It’s like an archive for me.”Footnote ⁸³ She, Malone, and Lucas studied The Real Alison Bechdel’s (TRAB’s) mannerisms and speech, and Skeggs and Malone visited the Bechdels’ former home in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. Beyond such emulation and research, Skeggs noted, “we also have this task of being this person who is growing—we’re all this one person, but at different stages of her life.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Malone’s performance revealed where she was going, while Lucas’s reminded her where she had been. All three actors shared their character’s common want: a relationship with Alison’s father, Bruce.Footnote ⁸⁵

Figure 3. Beth Malone as Bechdel watches Emily Skeggs, playing a younger version of herself, during a performance of Fun Home at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York, 26 March 2015. Photo: Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux.

Though Chilina Kennedy and other actresses have studied King’s accent and gestures, rather than impersonating her Kennedy suggests that she is instead “trying to capture Ms. King’s reluctant-superstar quality and the joy she found in singing and songwriting, while bringing her own spirit to the part.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This spirit is an essential element of Beautiful’s success and helps explain why audiences might go to the theatre in addition to listening to Tapestry at home. We might still be able to experience the actual Carole King at a concert, as was the case in July 2016 in London’s Hyde Park or September 2019 in New York’s Central Park, or attend a talk by the real Alison Bechdel, but the casting of performers to play each woman—the refleshing Roach identifies—recognizes a crucial element in the significance of iconic historical figures like them. Namely, that their personalities and spirit set them apart at particular moments in time, and so any actress helping to recreate that history also needs to recreate that difference and distinctiveness, which ultimately reveals why a musical theatre biography may be warranted in the first place. A theatrical form that routinely tasks characters with centering themselves on a stage to explore their identities and pursue dreams (often without a role model in sight) fits the lives led by real women like King and Bechdel.

King’s appealing songs may protect the actress playing her, but as London critic Dominic Cavendish noted, the actress Katie Brayben was, for him,

That magic has turned the performers into objects of desire, but also archives, with Jessie Mueller featured as an authority in a Carole King documentary.

When Carole King and Alison Bechdel appeared at their bio-musicals, audiences went wild, overwhelmed by the multiples they experienced. One London critic felt obliged to note Bechdel’s presence in the audience, but reinforced how already-present she is in Kron’s writing: “And you also see Alison Bechdel—not only because she is sitting in the audience on this particular press night, but also because Kron’s book is so brilliantly written, it treats the source material in a way that it neither obscures or copies it.”Footnote ⁸⁸ At the end of Fun Home, all three Alisons sing a fugue together about flying away. Singing in imitative counterpoint, the three Alisons copy each other, as if they are trying to figure things out together or are assembled at a consciousness-raising group. “Together, the memoir and the musical argue for the fact that plot and character are just a part of what affects us when we experience art,” New York Review of Books critic Francine Prose observed. “Our response is also determined by form, genre, setting—not only by the story but by the way the story is told.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Finally coming together, they musically perform the cathartic balance adult Alison mentions. With the presence of multiple Alisons (unusual in a musical prior to Tesori’s Violet and Shrek), this moment exceeds the realism of biography while simultaneously amplifying the real Bechdel through Tesori and Kron’s adaptive choice.Footnote ⁹⁰

Together, the women who have played Carole or Alison make up a special cohort of actors-as-historians, quoting from King’s and Bechdel’s archives, while performing her repertoire or sketching her cartoons. Staging multiple Alisons and Caroles is significant. “Alison’s story parallels the broader history of a nation coming to terms with changing definitions of family and sexuality,” Mansbridge notes, and the musical’s success demonstrates “the cultural legitimacy of lesbian experience.”Footnote ⁹¹ Because telling these women’s stories in a major forum such as a Broadway or West End theatre is still exceptional in a crowd of Evans, Aladdins, and Alexanders, an excess of realism is essential if Alison is to maintain her balance and continue soaring, and if Carole is to keep getting up every morning with a smile on her face. As ethnomusicologist Elizabeth L. Wollman lamented in 2012, “to be overtly feminist remains as culturally touchy now as it was three decades ago.”Footnote ⁹² In 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to receive a presidential nomination from a major party, Beautiful and Fun Home were both running. The regularity with which both musicals have been performed by amateur and professional theatres since their Broadway premieres also contributes to amplifying King and Bechdel’s presence and example in the world, and these numerous, publicly performing Alisons and Caroles insist that their audiences be okay with women being strong.

Feeling and Hearing History

Megan Stahl explores historical empathy in musicals such as Parade, a retelling of the murder trial and lynching of Jewish industrialist Leo Frank, and in The Scottsboro Boys, about the unjust rape conviction of nine African American teenagers in 1931. The kind of affective connection musicals establish with audiences also makes it possible, Stahl suggests, “to develop an empathic relationship between spectator and character.”Footnote ⁹³ The multiple elements of musical theatre that establish audiences’ emotional connection thus contribute to a historical musical also having an intellectual impact, provoking audiences’ evaluation of the ideas and experiences being chronicled by the musical. “Emotional engagement in a subject can support learning, as any teacher will attest,”Footnote ⁹⁴ Norton points out. “Sharing experiences and perspectives musically is a way to be known by others”Footnote ⁹⁵ she explains, giving the example of blues music’s ability to transmit the African American experience. Because music preserves and transmits content, such as history or a particular group’s experience, songs in biographical musicals about women have the potential to engage spectators deeply with women’s experience.

When the history represented foregrounds real women’s agency, status, and potential, from girlhood to adulthood, the musical becomes a repository for their history and a provocation for audiences to revise their understanding of women’s presence in history. Dolan recalls her spectatorship of the play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985), and its sound cue playing Geraldine Ferraro’s acceptance of the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1984: “I’ll never forget the chills I felt. . . . In that moment theatre became a place in which to collectively recall and celebrate history in the making.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Like Dolan, when real women in these musicals’ audiences leave the theatre having felt empathetically with the women onstage, their affective experience shifts, along with their gaze toward female subjects rather than objects.

The entertaining theatricality of musical theatre serves “to temper an unsettling empathic response,”Footnote ⁹⁷ Stahl notes. This is essential, because while musical theatre’s mainstream popularity certainly helps these feminist histories circulate and succeed on Broadway (and beyond), Beautiful and Fun Home’s woman-centered storytelling—where women characters sing the majority of songs and participate in frank discussions of sex, sexuality, suicide, and divorce—is unprecedented in an arena still dominated by narratives of male success and adventure. In her study of singing and the voice’s power over humans, Norton explores how humans respond to inflected voices and observes how “people sometimes identify with or feel sympathetic to—resonate with—a master speaker or virtuoso vocalist.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The high caliber of the musical theatre performers playing King and Bechdel helped to activate spectators’ feelings in the theatre, strengthening their connection to the lives and experiences represented onstage.

Watching the development of the song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” staged in Beautiful in relief to King’s relationship with her songwriting partner and husband Gerry Goffin, provides audiences with the entertainment of looking behind the scenes, while the song’s lyrics privilege a woman’s perspective on a potential sexual encounter. In Fun Home, when Small Alison sings, “I despise this dress. What’s the matter with boy’s shirts and pants?”Footnote ⁹⁹ the audience learns about her desire to control the construction of her identity while enjoying the talent of a young actor holding her own on a Broadway stage. As Canning suggests, “Through the connections between the audience and the performer(s), performed history can actively place the past in the community context of present time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The artistry and entertainment both musicals provide, then, helps them to establish meaningful connections between spectators and ideas about women’s agency, desire, nonconformity, and success.

Conclusion: Making Musical Theatre History on Broadway and Beyond

Beautiful and Fun Home were joined on Broadway in November 2015 by On Your Feet! The Story of Emilio & Gloria Estefan, another bio-musical featuring a real woman’s life onstage. Both Estefans served as producers and contributed orchestrations of their songs. Two actors played the Cuban American singer Gloria and Little Gloria, and the Estefans’ son, Nayib, along with Gloria’s mother, Gloria Fajardo, were also characters, making parent–child relationships and generational conflicts a part of the musical’s storytelling, as they were in Beautiful and Fun Home. More female music icons’ biographies followed, with Summer: The Donna Summer Musical, like Fun Home, relying on a trio of women to tell disco queen Summer’s story. The musical recounts Summer’s childhood performances at home as Donna Gaines with her sisters, and the actors playing the sisters later double as Summer’s own daughters. Such doubling strengthens the musical’s contribution to feminist historiography, insisting that we receive Summer’s life in the context of generations of women.

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical opened within a week of Summer, in London’s West End, directed by Mamma Mia’s Phyllida Lloyd with a book by Katori Hall with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins. (An earlier Tina Turner–inspired musical, Soul Sister, had enjoyed a brief run in London in 2012.) Tina subsequently opened in Hamburg and on Broadway in 2019. A child actor played Young Anna-Mae Bullock (Turner’s birth name) and Adrienne Warren played adult Tina in the London and New York premieres. Warren’s performance insisted, much like the performances already discussed, that Turner’s feelings be experienced by spectators, and thus offered a performance more heightened than the experience of reading a biography or watching a documentary. An icon known to ride a cherry picker during her concerts in order to move beyond the stage to engage her audience more closely, Turner agreed to a musical based on her life because, “I still can’t believe how people feel about me onstage,” as she writes in the musical’s souvenir program. “I hope this show serves what the people need.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Beyond the combination of feelings and ideas about a strong woman, her survival and success that the musical served the Tina audience, Turner herself recognized a gap in what was being offered to the public and that a musical might fill it.

A trio of Chers also arrived on Broadway in 2018, playing the singer and actor in The Cher Show, and confirming that an accomplished and driven woman’s life was so full that it benefited from having three women collaborating jointly as her avatars. Like Summer, The Cher Show was led by an all-male creative team, though Cher was one of the producers. When Broadway theatres reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic, real women’s lives continued to take up space in musicals, though their musical theatre biographies succeeded only to varying degrees with audiences. Diana, the Musical (2021), also created by an all-male team save choreographer Kelly Devine, told the story of the late British princess and lasted just a month on Broadway. Here Lies Love, about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, originally premiered Off Broadway at the Public Theater in 2013 and was remounted on Broadway a decade later, lasting four months.

In the same season, two more bio-musicals that premiered at the Public Theater followed Imelda Marcos to Broadway. Suffs, about the many women fighting for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century, premiered at the Public in 2022 and opened on Broadway in 2024 after major revisions. Written and composed by Shaina Taub, who also played Alice Paul, Suffs featured Nikki M. James as Ida B. Wells and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Cott (after previously originating the pathbreaking airline pilot Beverley Bass in Come from Away [2017]). Taub received Tony Awards for Best Score and Best Book of a Musical. Hell’s Kitchen, a jukebox musical drawing from Alicia Keys’s song catalog and loosely based on her life, opened at the Public in 2023 and transferred to Broadway just two days after Suffs. A final bio-musical, Lempicka, arrived on Broadway at the end of the 2023–4 season, chronicling the life and loves of bisexual Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, but lasted just a month.

Biographical musicals telling women’s stories have also proliferated outside of the United States. London welcomed Six (2017; Broadway 2021) after a premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe, telling the stories of Henry VIII’s six wives; Wasted (2018), a chronicle of the lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë and their brother, Branwell; Sylvia (2018), exploring the activism of suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst; and Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World (2022), based on a children’s book by Kate Pankhurst, a distant relative of the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Die Königinnen [The queens], a German-language musical chronicling the lives of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, premiered in 2024 in Linz, Austria. In South Korea, a Marie Curie musical premiered in 2020 and has since been translated for Japanese (2023) and British (2024) premieres, while Frida, exploring the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, premiered in Seoul in 2022 and was showcased at the University of Southern California in 2024. This boom in women’s biographical musicals on three continents, at fringe venues, not-for-profits, commercial venues, and on tour, consolidates real women as popular, and lucrative, subjects for the musical theatre stage. The variety in their musical styles, staging concepts, and design elements reveals the tremendous creative potential in using musical theatre to stage real women’s lives.

Prior to Suffs’s opening on Broadway, Hillary Clinton and Pakistani feminist and education activist Malala Yousafzai were announced as producers alongside Jill Furman and Rachel Sussman. Clinton, a longtime theatre fan, declared the musical “historic and relevant, and it’s emotional.”Footnote ¹⁰² Yousafzai became a musical theatre fan after she moved to the United Kingdom and connected with the title character in the musical Matilda. She saw Suffs Off Broadway and wanted to be involved, explaining, “This was a story that everybody needs to see and everybody needs to hear.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Together they acknowledged the learning opportunity that affective musical theatre storytelling can provide. As representatives of women of different generations and from different countries, Clinton and Yousafzai’s shared enthusiasm for musicals and joint participation in Suffs only serve to reinforce the appeal and efficacy of capturing the lives of pathbreaking women in musicals. Indeed, Beautiful tells King’s story so well that it became the foundation for a tribute to King when she was celebrated as a 2015 Kennedy Center honoree.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Wolf identifies moments of female self-assertion in earlier musicals, but Beautiful and Fun Home are themselves assertions, not just a selection of moments. The musicals Wolf chronicles in the 1970s made space for women and their politics, but they were not driven to tell a central, feminist story. She admits, “not marrying isn’t an option for them. Perhaps the women in Company would have benefitted from a consciousness-raising group.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The repercussions of Tapestry, and King’s example, played a major role in the mainstreaming of feminism through the 1970s, and the Bechdel test has also contributed to normalizing ongoing evaluations of women’s presence and agency. Beautiful and Fun Home, as widely circulating musicals, may have the potential to function similarly in mainstreaming women’s history. That both stagings of feminist history emerged simultaneously from different models of musical theatre production—the traditional commercial sphere and the subsidized not-for-profit sector—certainly suggests that a range of venues and producers are more willing to make space for such stories and storytellers. The subsequent productions cited above are the result of development processes and productions supported both by nonprofit theatres and by commercial producers.

Spectators at Beautiful have been mindful of the trip down memory lane that the musical offers. Whether growing up with the songs, or remarking, “The album Tapestry was the album of my high school years,”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ spectators also frequently mention how much they learned. On Broadway theatregoers were invited to pose for photos in the theatre lobby, in front of a photo of King’s backup singers in a studio, and feel like Carole when she is singing. Providing a prop microphone with which to pretend highlighted that this is a musical asking audiences to feel a woman’s experience. Fun Home spectator James B shared his affective and intellectual experience in a post on a TripAdvisor Internet forum:

This spectator privileges the real history Fun Home stages, and the affective mode of delivery, musical theatre. He acknowledges how distinct a musical Fun Home is for depicting the history it does.

Alison and Carole have traveled far beyond the paths they started on as girls and through their creative work have made space for women’s thoughts and feelings. The wide circulation and acclaim for the musicals depicting these journeys confirm Canning’s assertion that “performance, history, and feminism can intersect productively.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Girls and women are now seeing themselves in more musicals that encourage them to feel positively about being strong and powerful. The musical has changed its major.