Changing the Musical’s Major: Beautiful and Fun Home Redefine Feminist Historiography

At the end of the musical Fun Home (2015), Alison Bechdel urges her girl-self to keep challenging her father’s gendered expectations, and to take the road not taken, out of the closet and beyond her parents’ lives. She has the musical’s final word, recalling “a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him.” 1 At the end of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (2014), Carole also soars, to the heights of the music industry as she looks out at her Carnegie Hall audience of 1971 before the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. King is solo, center stage at the piano, in her concert debut, and at Carnegie Hall, no less, singing “Beautiful.” This image of an actual American woman, thriving and succeeding, urging her audience to think positively and define themselves from the inside out, is unprecedented. Her twenty-first-century audience sits on the verge of both ovating her success and raising their voices to feel the empowerment of her songs, just as Alison’s audience felt the power of her soaring.