Broadway review by Adam Feldman
There’s a big twist at the end of the first act of Death Becomes Her; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. And those are just two of the injuries that the vain actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and the bitter writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard) inflict on each other’s bodies in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about how the quest for beauty—in a misogynist world where the “F” word is fifty—can bring out the beasts in women. Its two central characters are old frenemies whose shared rage at age is understandable: They’re Mad and Hel, and they’re not going to take it anymore. The problem is how and on whom they take it out.
Adapted from the hit 1992 movie, Death Becomes Her introduces Madeline in a delicious show-within-a-show production number that sets up the musical’s themes with a giant wink. As the star of a Broadway musical called Me! Me! Me!, she wonders why she stays in “the chase to stay young and beautiful”—“Is it the fact that I’m attracted / To each kernel of external validation?” she sings, with nifty internal rhymes—before launching into a punning answer: “Everything I do is for the gaze.” The song then morphs into a pull-the-stop-out campfest, staged by director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli and costumed by Paul Tazewell as a spoofy tribute to Liza Minnelli in The Act. As colorful streamers fly into the audience, you might worry that Death Becomes Her is peaking too soon. It’s not: Having popped its cork early, the show keeps the bubbles flowing freely for the next two hours.
Death Becomes Her | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
At Madeline’s fancy New York apartment, she slips into predator mode: In a leopard-print dress that hilariously matches her couch, she moves in on poor dowdy Helen’s fiancé, a plastic surgeon named Ernest (Christopher Sieber, who wrestled Simard in Company). “Your upper register is amazing!” he says. “Thank you. They’re real,” she replies. Whatever Maddie wants, Maddie gets; soon she marries Ernest and drives Helen to the psych ward. Within a few years, though, Helen has turned the tables: She gets Mad, and gets even, through a supernatural makeover—courtesy of the enigmatic diva Viola (Michelle Williams, of Destiny’s Child) and her magical violet potion of eternal youth. But is looking good really the best revenge?
Death Becomes Her | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
As the women spiral into a vicious cycle of envy and retribution, the comedy keeps coming, and Gattelli keeps it moving. The pace never dips, and the show is a pleasure to look at: Derek McClane’s set moves cinematically among locations including Madeline’s gaudy Hollywood mansion and Viola’s gothic digs; Tazewell’s queenly costumes give the leading ladies glamour and ample architectural support, and Justin Townsend’s lighting pampers them in purple. Tongue-in-cheek stunt doubling throughout helps ease the transition into Tim Clothier’s amusingly morbid illusion effects when Death Becomes Her tips a toe into body horror. If Williams’s Viola is sometimes outshone by her gorgeous outfits, Taurean Everett is suitably shady as the lieutenant of her slinky minions, and Josh Lamon, as Madeline’s long-suffering gay assistant, hilariously redefines the term aide-de-camp.
Death Becomes Her | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Death Becomes Her’s deft score, by Broadway newcomers Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, gives the performers plenty of humor to play with, along with nicely overblown strains of mystery and grandeur when called for. The book by Marco Pennette, a veteran TV comedy writer, preserves key jokes from Martin Donovan and David Koepp’s screenplay while adding solid zingers of his own—when Madeline condescendingly suggests that Helen should change jobs, she notes that being a pharmacist is “like being a doctor and a cashier”—and only minimal injections of filler. (Don’t think gay audiences won’t notice when you crib a joke from Maggie Smith!) Pennette’s most significant changes to the story, at the end of both acts, have the salutary effect of keeping the show’s focus securely on the two main women. Sieber stops the show in a drunken and frantic second-act number, “The Plan,” but in the end this Ernest is just not important.
It’s the relationship between Madeline and Helen that really matters here—and Hilty and Simard, two of Broadway’s most gifted musical comedians, are the musical’s greatest selling point. Death Becomes Her sneakily has it both ways: It critiques a culture that pits women against each other while also deriving most of its fun from the spectacle of women at each other’s throats. But its two stars, both terrific, embody the best kind of competition. Each can steal a show (as Simard did in Once Upon a One More Time last year), but working in tandem only seems to spur them to raise their games. They have complementary approaches to pitching jokes: Hilty tends to throw them hard straight over the plate, while Simard favors curveballs. Together they make musical-comedy magic—and musical comedy, when performed this well, never gets old.
Death Becomes Her. Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (Broadway). Book by Marco Pennette. Music and lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. Directed by Christopher Gattelli. With Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, Christopher Sieber, Michelle Williams, Josh Lamon, Taurean Everett. Running time: 2hrs 20mins. One intermission.
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Death Becomes Her | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
