First published in 2006, Fun Home emerged as a critical darling and a cult favorite, in part thanks to the loyal fanbase for Bechdel’s long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. When the book was adapted into a musical in 2013, it saw rapid success at the Public Theater and became a critical sensation once again, named Best Musical by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Drama. After several reruns by popular demand, word came in fall 2014 that the show would move to Broadway. At the new venue, the 700- to 800-seat Circle in the Square Theater, the show’s capacity had more than doubled, and it needed to reach more people. Fun Home’s producers decided it necessitated a rebrand—a job that went to SpotCo, the marketing agency that has worked on hit shows such as Hamilton, The Book of Mormon, and School of Rock.

Selling Fun Home on Broadway meant balancing two aims: making it appeal to as many people as possible without misrepresenting the story’s spirit or substance. Two years after receiving the project brief for Fun Home, SpotCo’s co-founder and chief strategy officer Tom Greenwald recalled the main goal for marketing the show: “Make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter,’” he said, “And make sure that people realize that it’s a beautiful, universal, family story of self-identification, reflection, and ultimately, hope.” Not an easy task for a show that Greenwald said the marketing team jokingly referred to as a “lesbian suicide musical.”

The rebranding largely played out through the visuals and the taglines used to promote the show. After Fun Home arrived on Broadway, newspapers, social-media feeds, and the streets of New York City lit up with colorful advertisements selling it as a fun, feel-good musical. One initial poster featured the show’s logo—a rectangle house with Bechdel and her father as cut-out figures inside the “O” in “Home”—with a small tagline underneath announcing the arrival of “A NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL.” After lavish critical praise, that was changed to: “NOT JUST A NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL. A NEW KIND OF BROADWAY MUSICAL.” And finally, after a total of five Tony wins, the slogan said nothing but “WINNER! BEST MUSICAL 2015 TONY AWARDS.”

Of course, “a new Broadway musical” is very far from “a different Broadway musical,” let alone “a queer Broadway musical.” Despite a wide range of shows with LGBT characters, from Rent to Priscilla, Fun Home is the first musical on Broadway with a lesbian protagonist. The show’s all-female writing team was also the first of its kind to win the Best Original Score Tony Award. All of these notable achievements were lost in the attempt to garner as broad a viewership as possible—a sign of how difference is given room to breathe, but only in the margins.

SpotCo

As for the design of the show’s posters, the new versions moved away from Fun Home’s previous, slightly ominous red-white-blue color scheme. “We wanted to make sure it felt warm, as opposed to cold,” said Greenwald, who added that they also wanted to capture a vintage look since Fun Home is set in the 1970s. I search the logo for traces of queerness, maybe hints of the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 protests that ignited the modern gay-rights movement. The cut-out characters in the letter “O” come across as playful and serene, and while the color scheme is quirky, its range is too narrow and shades too deep to justify any real parallels to the queer flag. The cheeriness isn’t a total misrepresentation: Bechdel’s memoir is fun, but it’s also morbid and sad.