Ten years ago today, Fun Home opened on Broadway. Although it had already hit a home run Off-Broadway, the transfer of this memory-fuelled chamber musical to the Main Stem reminded us of something important: an innovative and intimate musical could hold its own against bigger, flashier and broader shows like Matilda, Kinky Boots and The Book of Mormon. Although it wasn’t the first smaller, more introspective show to have a big impact on Broadway — Once, for example, won the Tony Award for Best Musical just a few years earlier — Fun Home feels like a tipping point in the realm of contemporary musical theatre, paving the way for The Band’s Visit, A Strange Loop, Kimberly Akimbo and Maybe Happy Ending. A decade later, Fun Home hasn’t just held up — it’s still setting the bar. Here are five things worth celebrating in Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s deeply moving musical.

1. Fun Home Unapologetically Focuses on a Lesbian Protagonist.

Remarkably, Fun Home was the first Broadway musical with a lesbian character, Alison, at the centre of its story. It’s also refreshing that it’s neither framed as a simple coming-out story nor treated as a narrative that uses trauma as a consequence of queerness. That’s not to say those themes aren’t present — Alison’s queer awakening, the inherited culture of silence and emotional repression in the Bechdel family and Bruce’s death by suicide are central aspects of Fun Home — but the show weaves them into the narrative as subtly as the floating thread that makes damask the linen Bruce uncovers in “It All Comes Back (Opening).” This allows Fun Home to help us engage, through Alison’s journey, with the idea of connecting the dots between identity, memory, love and loss, universal ideas that her individual story illuminates. While Alison reflects on queerness as something that can be claimed joyfully, as in “Ring of Keys,” or grappled with generationally, in considering Bruce’s closeted life, it places her at the centre of the story in a way that isn’t aesthetic or superficial, but in a way that imbues the show with a deep sense of emotional complexity.

2. Fun Home Shatters Linear Time — With Purpose.

When people talk about musicals that manipulate time, they will likely mention Merrily We Roll Along or The Last Five Years. The spiral structure of Fun Home is often overlooked in these conversations. Its three timelines, each represented by different versions of Alison, shift fluidly as Alison considers her past and what this potentially means for her future. Alison encounters the younger versions of herself in the way we all meet our memories in real life. In the opening number, both she and Bruce sing:

I can’t abide romantic notions of some vague “long ago”
I want to know what’s true
Dig deep into who
And what, and why, and when
Until now gives way to then.

After Alison repeats Bruce’s sentiment, it becomes the show’s vision statement. What follows isn’t chronology but collage, with episodes flashing past us like the panels of Bechdel’s graphic novel. We don’t just learn Alison’s story; we map it alongside her.

3. Fun Home Lets Quiet Moments Speak Volumes.

So much of the power in Fun Home lies in what’s not said. “Telephone Wire,” for example, may be one of the quietest emotional climaxes in the musical theatre canon. It has to be, given that it deals with the heartbreak that a missed moment of connection can cause, and it is all the more devastating as a result. While many climactic moments rely on confrontation, Fun Home depicts the agonising experience and consequences of avoidance. As Bruce and Medium Alison sit in the car, frozen mid-drive, the dramatisation of the emotional distance between them speaks to the show’s restraint, tone and intent. It’s a fantastic counterpoint to “Days and Days,” a moment where Helen finds words to everything she has left unsaid over the course of her marriage to Bruce and her mothering of Alison. It’s the quietest of detonations, representing the roles wives and mothers have played in queer family dynamics. Are the supposed virtues of duty and silence worth the cost of not living truthfully? In an era when many musicals feel the need to spell out subtext, Fun Home trusts its audience to sit in the discomfort of what is unspoken — a rare case of theatrical maturity that rewards attentive viewing and makes return visits to the show all the more rewarding.

4. Fun Home Resists Neat Closure — and That’s What Makes It Linger.

One of the great joys of Fun Home is that even though it is emotionally fulfilling by the time the curtain ends, there is a sense we’re on a journey that never really ends. While there is resolution, there isn’t finality, leaving the audience in the same space as Alison. With some things worked out, there are journeys that can never come to an end. One of the strongest factors in creating this sense of open-endedness is the story’s focus on Alison’s fundamental psychological drives rather than using Bruce as a stereotypical or oppositional foil for her. Bruce is no simple villain. His internal and human tragedy stops us short of thinking about him as a mere monster. Like the books in his library, like the book Alison is creating, he is filled with subtleties and secrets. Even towards the end of the show, Alison reflects:

Caption. Caption. Caption. Caption. Caption. I’m the only one here. This is what I have of you. You ordering me to sweep and dust the parlor. You steaming off the wallpaper. You in front of a classroom of bored students. Digging up a dogwood tree. You working on the house, smelling like sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. You calling me at college to tell me how I’m supposed to feel about Faulkner or Hemingway. You standing on the shoulder of Route 150 bracing yourself against the pulse of the trucks rushing past. You succumbing to a rare moment of physical contact with me.

Her only conclusion?

Caption: Every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.

Because Fun Home resists reducing things into simplistic moral binaries, its exploration of generational trauma and the cost of silence when it comes to working out who we are is all the more effective.

5. Fun Home makes “Ring of Keys” a Cultural Moment.

When discussing the legacy of Fun Home, “Ring of Keys” deserves its own spotlight. As Small Alison experiences a truly joyful queer awakening, with no shame or fear, her recognition and awe of a delivery woman she feels she somehow knows gives us a queer anthem that rings true.

I thought it was supposed to be wrong
But you seem okay with being strong….

Do you feel my heart saying hi?
In this whole luncheonette why am I
The only one who sees you’re beautiful –
No, I mean… handsome….

I know you.

In some ways, it’s a generational awakening that represents the spark of revelation felt by queer people everywhere, no matter how old they might be when it comes. And while we love queer anthems that give us the opportunity to sing out, the way that “Ring of Keys” almost whispers its way into your heart is the perfect way to dramatise a universal memory, that moment of knowing. In many ways, “Ring of Keys” redefines how musicals can frame queer identity.

There is a great deal to celebrate about Fun Home. A chamber musical that feels epic, it delivers emotional weight on a grand scale with a small ensemble of actors and a handful of musicians. Outside of the show, another triumph worth mentioning is the collaboration between Kron and Tesori as a rare female writing team whose work is so symbiotic that their voices feel like one. What they create in Fun Home is a show that ages like all the best literature: we’re still finding pieces of ourselves in its map and discovering the map of our hearts and souls in the show. A decade after its Broadway bow, Fun Home is still a musical gem — quietly radiant and endlessly resonant.