Divas at Dusk: Death Becomes Her as Broadway Camp

From Death Becomes Her, at the Lunt-Fontanne. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

A Broadway season dominated by divas has also brought a spate of shows about the cruelty of show business, centering on the women it simultaneously venerates and tears down. In Sunset Blvd., Norma Desmond’s shadow younger self (a Jamie Lloyd invention) stalks the stage and the screen behind Nicole Scherzinger with the implication of abuse endured during her start in the studio system. In The Hills of California, Laura Donnelly’s stage mother trades favors with small-time music-industry men for her daughters’ advancement, and then Donnelly steps in to play that same daughter decades later. Even in Oh, Mary!, the quest for fame in the “legitimate theater” winds its way through violence and vomit. The furious all-timer of the genre, Gypsy, is headed into previews.

Yet the title of the campiest and yet cruelest diva-worship of the bunch will probably rest with Death Becomes Her, a relentlessly eager-to-please adaptation of the 1992 horror comedy that begs you to laugh with and at its dueling lead actresses. The film is something of a special-effects showcase by its director Robert Zemeckis, a most hetero director with two movies running as musicals on Broadway right now. It unintentionally became a gay classic thanks to the commitment of Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep (though Streep has said she hated filming a CGI-heavy film, comparing it to acting across from a lampshade). The catfight premise lies in the vein of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?: two lifelong frenemies discover the secret to eternal life, and then use it to tear each other literally to bits while fighting over a man. The appeal lies in the uneasy overlap between empowerment and bitchiness. “You really can’t underestimate the entertainment value of two women swinging shovels at each other,” one of its screenwriters, David Koepp, told Vanity Fair, which about sums up why the movie has inspired bits on Drag Race (and, more recently, a Sabrina Carpenter video). You can certainly chide the impulse to be entertained by this stuff, and you can also appreciate it as a fun-house-mirror expression of love and devotion. Either way the worship and the blood sport go hand in hand.

The musical takes what was once accidental and pursues it with dogged intention. Smash’s Megan Hilty steps into the Meryl Streep part (and cribs Streep’s bio for her own in the Playbill) as the deluded actress Madeline Ashton. She introduces herself with a number from her big Broadway hit, in which she announces that everything she does is “For the Gaze.” In case the pun in Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s songwriting isn’t obvious, Death Becomes Her’s director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli has Hilty flanked by a crew of chorus boys dressed in the colors of a pride flag, while she races through costume changes to become Liza and Judy—a Toto plushie shoots up into her hands from the orchestra pit. The pandering works because Hilty’s an ace physical comedian, able to infuse the smallest wrist twirl with grandiosity, armed with a voice that goes from operatically Galinda to the brass blare of moving the line. Madeline’s nemesis, the novelist Helen Sharp, arrives in the form of Jennifer Simard, recently of Company, whose demonic take on “Toxic” was the highlight of that one Britney musical. Simard can pull off gymnastics tricks with her line deliveries, often while keeping to a sardonic growl, and she and Hilty have real stage chemistry. In the classic blonde-versus-brunette mold, Madeline’s always been the favorite, witlessly brutal and fond of stealing Helen’s boyfriends. When Helen shows up with a fiancé who happens to be a plastic surgeon (Christopher Sieber, one of our finest onstage dopes), Madeline inevitably grabs him too.

Death Becomes Her fires on all cylinders, like a fine automobile that runs on ecologically dodgy fuel, as the first act speeds through Madeline’s betrayal and Helen’s first swing at revenge. Everyone, especially book writer Marco Pennette, is most comfortable when the characters are throwing barbs at each other, and there’s more actress-y vapidity in the culture than ever before for them to mine. There are jokes about resewing sagging flesh, about trading sex for roles, about product placement at weddings, and about everyone at CAA shitting themselves on a tapeworm diet that directly cribs a quote in New York’s own story about semaglutides—though Ozempic itself goes surprisingly unmentioned. Madeline and Helen’s meanness is both hilarious and queasy in a Joan Rivers way—finely crafted, and likely to leave you walking down the street worried about your own problem zones. It may intend to send up the expectations of body image and age, but considering the skin-tight costuming of the ad-for-your-local-Equinox bodies of the ensemble, it’s enforcing them too.

The humor courses through the score, which is a few cuts above the de rigueur movie-to-musical standard. A silver lining of some IP-based productions can lie in their producers willingness to hire less-familiar names. That may be calculated—if you have a guaranteed audience off the name, why not save on the creative team?—but it can also provide a great opportunity. Death Become Her’s songwriters Mattison and Carey are newcomers to Broadway. They write with confidence, wit, and nifty wordplay, as when Helen counters Madeline’s pride in her “dramedies” with “straight to DVDs?” The songs are usually patter-forward, though they go gothic and Phantom-ish with their music for Viola Van Horn, the mysterious woman who offers Madeline and Helen eternal beauty in a glowing pink vial. On film, that’s Isabella Rossellini (who has been enlisted to offer the pre-recorded warning about turning off your phone), and on stage it’s Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child. She sings beautifully, though her attempts at comedy are so uncertain they become jaggedly fascinating. While the show, like the film, tends to keep the softer emotions at a distance, Mattison and Carey have also delivered Hilty a “Rose’s Turn”-style cri de cœur that gives her the chance to perform in many registers in quick succession. The result is virtuosically impressive, if not emotionally gripping. You can feel the moment tiptoe away from asking your full sympathy when the show has Madeline shout “give me your skin!” at a Gen-Z valet.

The whizzing refusal to look deeper grows more nagging as Death Becomes Her continues. The first act ends with an impressive re-creation of one of the film’s signature CGI moments, an illusion here designed by Tim Clothier. The second ups the ante with a severed neck and a shotgun blast through the torso, tricks accomplished with careful misdirection and (to my mind, charmingly) obvious body doubles. The effects are fun, and as with Paul Tazewell’s costumes and Derek McClane’s set, a patina of cheapness keeps the thing in the mode of camp. But where you might hope for a musical to expand on, or at least more deeply interrogate, its source material, this production maintains the level of interiority suggested by Zemeckis’s film, which is to say, not much. It’s a loss: Think of Groundhog Day, using its second act to curlicue into the existential musings of secondary characters, or Legally Blonde’s deploying its title song as a melancholy beat before its own reprise. (Or even—not to set too high a bar—A Little Night Music’s score, cutting bedroom farce with deep feeling.) Death Becomes Her avoids forcing Madeline and Helen to look in the mirror and contemplate. Yes, these women would hate both mirrors and any form of introspection, but why not tell us more about Madeline’s issues with her mother? Or expand on Helen’s brief soliloquy about how, if she never ages, she’ll just wander the earth until the sun devours the planet and she gets sucked into a black hole, unable to die? The line is played for a laugh—“well, don’t be a stranger!” Madeline counters—but it’s wild and dark and if set to music, might make for a dirge both grim and hilarious.

To delve into that sort of darkness more might be upsetting, and potentially less brand-friendly for Universal, but the surface level-focus of Death Becomes Her kept gnawing at me. It also stalls the show’s second act. Once you have Madeline and Helen taking swings at each other—and yes, shovel combat is never not funny—the production has little new territory to cover, thematically or emotionally. The plot barrels on as the enthusiasm wanes, from both the audience and the performances. Sieber’s character, the most obvious voice for a grounding rebuttal to Helen and Madeline’s obsession with eternal youth, has a solo that’s too silly by half, a duet with a talking paint can. Stuck in the mode of camp exuberance, Gattelli powers through the rest of the action by means of a chase sequence (echoes of Some Like It Hot, though not Nicholaw-level precise) toward an anticlimactic finale. As on film, Helen and Madeline end up as allies, each dependent on the other to patch up her body. They cruise, forever youthful, toward eternity, making fun of other people’s funeral services. They leave us with a wink and meta-joke, a song about how they’ll never have an ending, but if they did, it might go a little like this … The conceit’s cleverly nipped and tucked, the work of fine theatrical plastic surgery, hard to dislike and ultimately—as a medical examiner might say of these women—without a heartbeat.

Death Becomes Her is at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.