‘Death Becomes Her: The Musical’ Review: Witness Broadway Bitchery and Body Horror
The Substance is a musical on Broadway already? Well, not exactly, but on paper it sure seems that way with Death Becomes Her: The Musical. A scathing critique on the pressure cooker of the beauty industry for women? A de-aging drug with a terrible price? Two divas at war? The Venn Diagram overlap of The Substance and the 1992 Death Becomes Her film (screenwritten by Martin Donovan and David Koepp and directed by Robert Zemeckis) just writes itself. Look out world, Death Becomes Her: The Musical may just be the biggest body horror bitch-off on Broadway.
The musical premiered earlier this year at the Chicago Cadillac Palace before its Broadway transfer. Freshened up with uproarious one-liners and theatrical flair, Marco Pennette’s book gets to the bottom of why its two obsessive anti-heroines are so magnetic.
Failing actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty of Smashed and Wicked) is Narcissism Incarnate, desperate to stay relevant and unwrinkled in the film industry that’s now pigeoning holing her into direct-to-DVD sequels and the “before” profile of the “before/after” skin cream commercials. (As a joke, Hilty’s playbill bio plagiarizes the accolades of her movie predecessor, Meryl Streep). Luckily, Madeline has prey to feed off when her frenemy, Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard of Company and Once Upon a Once More Time) parades her fiancé, the surgeon Ernest Menville (a schmucky Christopher Siebe). Having been the victim of Madeline’s chronic boyfriend stealing, Helen is convinced that her newfound emotional fulfillment will heal her from her rivalry against Madeline. Sure enough, Madeline steals Ernest away from Helen, sending the latter into the spiral of vengeance.
Then Helen miraculously resurfaces with a published book and younger skin and rubs it in Madeline’s face. The jealous actress happens upon the source of Helen’s rejuvenation. No, it’s not plastic surgery; it’s the fabulous immortal Viola Van Horn (Destiny’s Child’s Michelle Williams, spellbinding in her amethyst geode costume), the mysterious supplier of the Substance—I mean, the youth-restoring potion. But it comes with a price. She delivers a warning: “Take care of yourself… you and your body are going to be together for a very long time.”
Sure enough, the proverbial monkey paw curls its fingers. The eternal youth potion puts Madeline’s and Helen’s newly immortal bodies in a zombified state that can get scratched. How can these frenemies take care of their outer shells when they’re either strangling each other or dueling with shovels? (Cha Ramos is credited as the fight director, while Beetlejuice: The Musical’s sound designer Peter Hylenski contributed the cartoonish and bone-crunching sounds). And yet, by ripping each other’s flesh, Madeline and Helen can express their rivalry-cum-friendship in the only way they know how. They are the combustible bond of fire and oil.
Death Becomes Her: The Musical is anchored by musical comic legends Hilty and Simard. Their prowess elevates Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s music and lyrics, which offer intermittent pleasures in technical playfulness. The musical isn’t interested in softening the divas into conventional likability, trusting that they are relatable because of their addiction to catastrophe and their worst impulses. Other than rightfully excising the movie’s fatsuit gag, the musical makes a judicious revision for their relationship: It’s Helen, not Ernest, who shoves Madeline down the stairs—the Legendary Slow-Mo Staircase Fall that sent the theater into throes of laughter.
Although Ernest seemingly plays himself as the straight man to deliver a moral of the story, the joke is that the ladies disrupt his soppy didactic numbers. It’s the spurned women who get the last laugh and belt high notes to the stratosphere. We love them precisely for their vanity. We love them because they break the rules of decency and nature. In their final duet, they wonder what it would be like to “find out if there was a moral to our story,” but the musical suggests they found empowerment in being moral-free together for eternity.
Williams’ Viola (succeeding Isabella Rossellini’s role in the film) proves to be a gravitational pull. This musical drenches Derek McLane’s vibrant scenic design in the purple hues of Viola’s Gothic manor. Like an omniscient trickster goddess, a smirking Viola haunts the musical when she’s not regaling herself in her Gothic palace of Immortal partiers (an ensemble led by Viola’s second-in-command Chagall, played by an alluring Taurean Everett).
The camp is strong with this musical, starting with Madeline’s raucous, motive-defining opener “For the Gaze” deliberately banging on the eardrums as “For the Gays!” as Hilty serves the Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland quick-changes. Director Christopher Gatelli’s showy choreography and Paul Tazewell’s costumes (Tazewell contributed to the Wicked two-parter movies and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story) blows thousands of proverbial kisses to the queers, credited for sanctioning the movie into “cult classic” status.
More jaw-dropping than the flying DeLorean four streets down at its related-by-Zemeckis cousin, Back To the Future: The Musical is Death Becomes Her’s stunt and stagecraft (Tim Clotheir’s illusion work) of severed body parts, the notorious abdominal hole that becomes a repository of a stabbing, and a decapitated body scurrying like a headless chicken.
Musicals of femmes coming to terms with their body—and the societal expectations encasing it—are also in abundance in NYC in different wavelengths. “You’re going full Sunset Boulevard,” teases Madeline’s assistant (a funny Josh Lamon), a meta-nod to Madeline’s commonalities with a faded silent film star of the bloody Sunset Boulevard revival starring Nicole Scherzinger. In addition, Teeth: The Musical tackles a young woman’s body autonomy and shame, and the sci-fi romance Maybe Happy Ending is a branch in the lineage with a femme-presenting bot making a life decision based on her robotic shelf-life.
While the movie arguably bore a finger-wagging cautionary perspective, Death Becomes Her: The Musical extends communion for those seeking the unattainable. At the end of the musical, the crystalline potion vial dips above the audience like a disco ball, floating the temptation above hundreds of heads, beckoning you to come dance with Viola’s flock.
The musical officially opened on November 21, 2024, on Broadway with a currently open-ended run. The Broadway cast album is announced for spring 2025.
-
Death Becomes Her: The Musical
Categorized:Reviews
