News And Blogs

"Once upon a time in a far-off kingdom lived a family, a sad young lad, and a childless baker with his wife," starts the fairy tale-rich musical masterpiece Into The Woods, which plays the Ahmanson Theatre through May 14, 2017. Cast member Darick Pead describes the show as "a story about all the fairy tales that you know and love and what happens a...

Once Upon a Time…on Center Theatre Group’s Stages

Ten years ago, a group of recent graduates of the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA acting program living and working in New York decided to form a theatre company. They called themselves the Fiasco Theater because, as they explain on their website, “While we hope to avoid on-stage disasters, we do believe that it is only when artists are brave en...

Celebrating the Fiasco that Is ‘Into The Woods’

Throughout Fun Home, onstage through April 1, 2017 at the Ahmanson Theatre, books serve as markers of different stages in graphic memoir author Alison Bechdel’s life. A book from her dad offers a hint that he might know she’s a lesbian; a bookstore is where she realizes she’s gay. In the graphic memoir especially, books are a means for Bechde...

The 'Fun Home' Reading List

This month, we’re proud to have productions at three theatres—plus a bonus live art theatrical experience—that demonstrate our commitment to diversity in every sense of the word.

Civil Rights, Memoirs, and a World Premiere Playwright

In 1985, Fun Home graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel changed film criticism—or at least feminist film criticism—as we now know it when two of the characters in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For tried to go to the movies. In the strip, titled “The Rule,” one woman explains to another her movie-going rule—the three basic req...

Putting 2017 Oscar Nominees to the ‘Fun Home’ Memoirist’s Bechdel Test

Would you believe that the first graphic memoir published in America was titled Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary? The 1972 tale of how Roman Catholicism shaped the life of author Justin Green, Binky Brown is seen as the start of a rich tradition of using comics to explore personal histories. Three decades and a half later, in 2006, Alison Bec...

Eight Graphic Memoirs for Fans of ‘Fun Home’