Archive for the LGBTQ Category


Fun Home The Musical on Broadway

April 4th, 2015

funhome

***Special Superlative Alert. This review will contain an overuse of superlatives. Be warned. If you know of a superlative that was not used in this review, consider it implied.***

In 2006, Alison Bechdel, creator of the Dykes to Watch Out For serial comic, (the origin of what is now called the Bechdel-Wallace Test,) winner of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant, published a graphic memoir of her life called Fun Home. When I reviewed the book here, I said about it “Fun Home was incredibly good, and it simply doesn’t matter whether I liked it, or not.”  It was brilliantly written, unremittingly intelligent, with breathtaking honesty about the lack of affection and emotional engagement in her family. And now…it is a play. A musical no less.

When we’re children, most of us have a good laugh at the idea of our lives as musicals. You’re standing with a sibling in the kitchen, and you break into a tuneless song about cereal and laugh. And here you are, Alison Bechdel, and this is a thing. Imagine that.*

A few weeks ago,  the extremely kind folks at Fun Home the Musical  invited me to see their show. I was very excited about this, and then, the reality sort of set in – this is a play…of a graphic novel…and it’s a musical. My first thought was “Really? Do I want to do this? I don’t even like musicals.”** But, yeah, I wanted to do this. Happily, my wife joined me for the evening. She was going to be a good barometer for whether the show held up for someone with no preconceived notions of or experience with the book.

I’m going to skip to the punch line and tell you that, as we stood waiting for our car at the parking lot, sobbing, we agreed that it was an amazing show. Absolutely fantastic in every way. In fact, she gave it the score 11 on a scale from 1 to 10.

You do not need to have read Fun Home*** to enjoy this show. It was so tightly put together that you could walk in cold, with no idea who Alison Bechdel is or what the book was about and still walk away impressed. My wife, who has not read the book, is emphatic about this. As a musical adaptation of a graphic novel, it was enormously successful. The play begins and ends with the concept of comic art, and the adult Alison “captions” the action from the side, reminding us that these are drawings, memories, a cartoon, even as the drama sucks us in.

Let’s start with the cast. It’s a small cast, and with a group that size, if there is even one weak link, it really shows. There were no weak links in this cast. All three of the ladies who play Alison Bechdel as a child, a college student and adult, were fantastic. Of them, I wish I could say which was best, although, as my favorite song “Ring of Keys” was sung by “Small Alison,” Sydney Lucas, I’m slightly partial to her. But in truth, they were all incredibly strong. Here’s “Ring of Keys “for you to enjoy…but she was even better in tonight’s performance.

My wife’s favorite song was sung by “Middle Alison,” Emily Skeggs, who was…perfect. She was so adorable and geeky, with awkward body language and introvert physicality – any one of us would instantly see ourselves in her.  Here’s Emily, singing “Changing my Major” – I’m only sorry there’s no video.

But, when Beth Malone, as adult Alison, and Michael Cerveris who played Bruce, her father, sang their final duet, pretty much everyone on my side of the theater lost it. The sniffling on the stage may have been acting, but no one in the seats were faking it. (No link to this song. I want you to see the play live, so it gets you in the gut the way it was meant to.) Michael Cerveris deserves a nod for his performance. Pent-up, frustrated, awkward, desperate, pathetic, he was genuinely masterful. And Judy Kuhn as Alison’s mother…wow. Just…wow. Her solo song is crushing.

The rest of the cast is equally exceptional. Roberta Colindrez as Joan was funny and sexy in a college dykey way and Joel Perez, who played several characters, really nailed the tawdryness of Bruce’s affairs. Zell Steele Morrow had gap-toothed little brother appeal in every way, and Oscar Williams was charismatic as Alison’s brother Christian. Every single performer had a great voice, but we felt that the three youngest, Lucas, Morrow and Williams, really stood out as exceptional singers and established the show as something to be taken seriously musically.

Which brings me to the songs. They were fantastic. One of the things that has me depressed about Broadway recently, has been the lack of…everything. Quite a lot of what’s playing are tried and true hits, stage adaptations of movies and a number of retreads from the past.  Gigi was playing across the street, for instance. I was looking for something fresh that I would not have seen or heard before. With the exception of one song, which was still good, just rather Broadway-musical-esque, I found exactly what I had hoped in Fun Home. I’ll be singing “Ring of Keys” for days to come. As Bechdel comments in her comic, it’s a lesbian anthem. Kudos to Tesori and Kron who did the music. Absolutely stellar. I especially liked the leitmotif of “I want…” in several of the pieces.

Even the theater did the play justice. It’s currently playing in Circle in the Square, so seats are in set all the way around the stage floor – and the actors really use the space well. The audience, which was pleasantly mixed gender- and age-wise, with a strong lean towards the LGBTQ side, was on their feet immediately as the clapping began.

Obviously, the scenes of identity and sexual awakening resonate like crazy for me…and based on the reactions of the audience, for many. Did it have as much resonance for the non-LGBTQ audience members? (I asked a straight friend who had seen it off Boradway and he said that yes, while of course the ring of keys was not a specific trigger, he too had that moment when he saw an adult in a bookstore and thought, “I know you.”)

I have only one thing left to say. If you can see this play, go see this play.

Friends of mine from out of town, if you want to see this play, I’ll give you a bed, put you on the right train and pick you up at the station when you come back.

Okazu Readers – you, especially, need to see this play. For so many of us, this is us. This is our lives and our songs.

 

Ratings:

Overall – 11

It was a a play…of a graphic novel…and it’s a musical. So it gets an extra point.

Go see Fun Home. It was, in every way, an extraordinary show.****

 

Notes:

* Bechdel drew a comic (of course) on her feelings about the play. And she’s drawn a coda to Fun Home specifically addressing her parents and how they might have felt about it.

**Except for 1776. I will always love that musical. And, in retrospect, an awful lot of the musicals I’ve seen had some relation to comics: Annie (it was my sister’s 11th birthday present); Scarlet Pimpernel which I first read in classic comic form; Rose of Versailles, of course; Hakushaku no Reijou, the last Takarazuka thing I saw; Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah, which was amazing. Clearly this is a thing with me.

*** You should read Fun Home. Buy it, borrow it from the library, but you should really read it.

**** It won 5 Tony Awards last night and deserved every one of them.





LGBTQ Manga: Torikaebaya (とりかえ・ばや ), Volume 6

March 17th, 2015

Torikaebaya6When we last left Chiho Saito-sensei’s beautiful and tragic retelling of the Heian classic tale, Torikaebaya (とりかえ・ばや ), I was having a crisis. It’s so damn beautiful, I want to keep reading, but it’s so damn heart-wrenching, it’s hard to keep reading.

Volume 5 ended with Sarasojuu running from the capital, pregnant with Tsuwabuki’s child, devastated that she can no longer live her chosen life. Suiren, overcome by love for Toguu-sama, gives in to desire and kisses her.

As Volume 6 opens, I keep wondering if there are any more boots to drop…and, of course, there are.

Suiren has been called up to the Emperor’s residence to be one of his women. This precipitates a decision that Suiren can never go back and change. Refusing the Emperor’s call, Suiren confesses that he is a man to Toguu-sama. He leaves her service, and returns home, to become the man his sister was. Passing is merely a matter of not interacting because, although Suiren and Sarasojuu are identical in looks, Suiren has none of Sarasojuu’s skills at horseback riding or other pursuits.

Suiren, disguised as Sarasojuu, overhears a rumor of Tsuwabuki’s second woman being pregnant, guesses what has happened and heads off to find Sarasojuu.

Sarasojuu, having been taken in by Tsuwabuki, is now called Sara-hime, and is pining away, as the baby’s birth grows near. Conversely, Tsuwabuki is beside himself with joy, having both the women he loves and their children in his home. Sara is not on board with this, and poor, poor Shi-no-hime, who had no idea who this other woman was, until her son calls Sara “father”. Shi-no-hime, who has been unconscious for much of the volume swoons once again. Of everyone, I feel the most pity for her, a woman drawn into someone else’s story with no good way out.

Sara’s baby is stillborn and, naturally, she blames herself.

Suiren finds Sara, at last, as she is just about to drown herself. Suiren tries to convince Sara to return to the capital and resume their lives as before, even though he himself is not sure he can ever return to the life he’s left.

I am less distraught this volume, as I carefully fed myself a few pages at a time, knowing that this story was going to offer no respite. Parsing out mere pages of exquisitely gorgeous, emotionally agonizing story, meant that I was able to get through it without trouble. I’m desperately flailing in mind, as I read every fresh hell, to come up with ideas for a non-horrible ending. So far I am failing. And the one ending I foresee that will give the characters the happy end they deserve will have to be a very annoying tengu ex machina. ^_^;

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – 1
LGBTQ – 6

Overall – 9

Saito-sensei’s art has always been exquisite and here, she reaches her pinnacle. It’s so perfect a tale for her style.





LGBTQ Comic: Doukyonin no Bishoujo ga Lesbian Datta Ken (同居人の美少女がレズビアンだった件)

February 22nd, 2015

DnBgLdKMakimura Asako is a woman who, for the last few years, has been working very hard to make a name for herself in Japan as a LGBTQ advocate and activist with books like Yuri no Real and her essay on being a “Yuri” otaku in the Eureka “Current State of Yuri Culture” issue. In Doukyonin no Bishoujo ga Lesbian Datta Ken (同居人の美少女がレズビアンだった件), she and her erstwhile roomate, artist Koike Miki, create an autobiographical comic essay about her life.

The principle concept is that in expensive Tokyo, there are “share houses” which function much like a dormitory – as many as 16 people in a room with bunk beds, sharing a kitchen and bath facilities. Koike, having come to Tokyo for a job, finds herself renting space in a share house and meeting Makimura. Makimura Asako, former Miss Japan finalist and TV personality, comes out to her housemates and they just sort of all get over themselves.

The middle of the book is more autobiography about Makimura’s life and experiences coming out and building a career post-coming out. And then…she falls in love. Her girlfriend, known here as “Mori-girl” or “Moriga” for short, is a French woman who was into anime that ran on French TV, learned Japanese and came to the land of miruku and hachimitsu. She and “Makimuuu~” meet at a club and fall in love. Now the housemates have to not only deal with the idea of a lesbian, but the actuality of a lesbian couple.

Ultimately, Koike and Makimura move out together, while Makimura travels the world, Koike stays behind to work on this book, which was, in part, motivated by Higashi Koyuki and Masahara Hiroko’s own bio comic essay Lesbian-teki Kekkon Seikatsu. We get a little side trip into Koike’s interest in having a romantic partner, but not much. There is quite a lot about Makimura meeting and being accepted by her French in-laws, and a bit about Same-Sex Marriage becoming legal in France. These are paralleled by Koike’s struggle to make the book work, and her editor’s coming out as Trans*.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 10
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 10

Overall, this is a pleasant read, with an emphasis on the cute and silly moments, and nods to the struggles of LGBTQ folks, without wallowing. If I were teaching a class in Japan on LGBTQ issues, this seems like it would make a nice addition to the curriculum.





Support the Queers and Comics conference with Queer Pin-up Cards!

February 20th, 2015

In conjunction with Northwest Press, the Queers and Comics Conference, in New York City, May 7-8, 2015, is fundraising with a set of original Queer Pin-Ups.

The list of contributors is a great overview  of Queer Comics in America today.  The list includes many folks we consider friends here, Rica Takashima, Jennifer Camper, Mari Naomi, Carlo Quispe, Kris Dresen, JD Glass and and Bara sensation, Gengoroh Tagame.  And of course many more. Check out the full list on the Northwest Page.

Many of these folks will be participating at the conference, as well. I’ll be running a session on Yuri manga and moderating another. As soon as details are avaiable, I’ll get them to you. ^_^ This is going to be a fantastic conference!

Queer Pin-Ups Cards, from Northwest Press
$15 pre-orders, $20 afterwards

This is a one-of-a-kind gift and a fantastic way to support queer comics in America!





Yuri Short Story: Yoshiya Nobuko’s Yellow Rose (English)

February 15th, 2015

yellowrose Today’s review comes under the category of “At last!” Dr. Sarah Frederick’s discussion and translation of Yoshiya Nobuko’s Yellow Rose (黄薔薇) from her Hana Monogatari collection is available to us in English on Kindle from Expanded Editions press. It was worth every penny of the 299 pennies it cost – and to be perfectly honest, I would have paid considerably more to have it.

This epublication begins with a very excellent discussion of the time frame of the story, the symbolism it contains in the context of early 20th century Japanese literature, conjecture about the lacunae within the story and other literary and historical commentary. The kind of thing that reawakens my dormant inner Comp. Lit. major and makes me ridiculously happy. Even more personally meaningful, Frederick includes a small, but pointed rebuke to academic authors who do not acknowledge that reader’s impressions have both meaning and weight in popular thought. You may remember that that was my primary criticism of Passionate Friendships – that being cautioned to not see something as “lesbian” when, through my filter it could not be read as otherwise, is wasted effort. ^_^ Here Frederick acknowledges my point as, if not objectively verifiable, then at least subjectively valid.

The introduction was at least as good as the story itself. That alone would have been worth reading this for. But then, we get to enjoy one of the two “Yuri” stories from Hana Monogatari. In Yellow Rose, we meet a just-graduated young woman who is off to her first job as a teacher, only bare years older than her students and the student with whom she forms a romantic relationship. It is a short, fraught story with a surprisingly bleak ending. Even more unusually bleak, when compared with Otome no Minato a scant decade later. But, perhaps more importantly, while the ending is neither happy nor sad, it also does not contain the “marriage or death” ending that will plague Yuri narrative from the 1960s well into the 2000s.

The translation itself is…well, wonderful. Frederick is able to capture the early 20th-century constipated sentence structure while keeping both the narrator’s voice and the narrative whole.

In short, this was tail-waggingly good and if you are at all interested in early Yuri, early queer lit or basically anything that we care about here at Okazu, you should absolutely get this Kindle edition! (If you don’t have a Kindle or kindle app, you can read it on Amazon’s in-browser Kindle reader.)

Ratings:

Art – 9 The cover art is adapted from a Takabatake Kashō illustration ,“Bara no gensō” (薔薇の幻想). It suits this edition well.
Story – 8
Characters – 8 For such a short story, the protagonist is surprisingly three-dimensional.
Yuri – 6
Service – 2 That distinctively early 20th century verbal sensuality-service

Overall – 9

Thanks to Dr. Frederick for shout-outs to both Yuricon and Okazu. An unexpected surprise. Thank you!

Lastly I want to note the obvious, intentional irony of the one incontrovertibly not-‘S’ character in Maria-sama ga Miteru being the Yellow Rose, Torii Eriko.