“The most fun night out on Broadway!” – The Daily Beast
Madeline Ashton is the most beautiful actress (just ask her) ever to grace the stage and screen. Helen Sharp is the long-suffering author (just ask her) who lives in her shadow. They have always been the best of frenemies…until Madeline steals Helen’s fiancé away. As Helen plots revenge and Madeline clings to her rapidly fading star, their world is suddenly turned upside down by Viola Van Horn, a mysterious woman with a secret that’s to die for.
After one sip of Viola’s magical potion, Madeline and Helen begin a new era of life (and death) with their youth and beauty restored…and a grudge to last eternity.
Time Out New York raves, “4 STARS! Death Becomes Her is savagely funny,” and Deadline declares it’s “wildly entertaining — a perfect musical comedy.” “Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard are two theatrical masterminds giving hilarious star turns” (The New York Times). Grammy® winner Michelle Williams is “irresistibly fabulous” (Theatermania), and “Christopher Sieber stops the show” (Time Out New York). Death Becomes Her, based on the classic 1992 film, is “a laugh-filled, tuneful musical to die for” (Variety).
As the plot grows more ludicrous and convoluted, the fun peters out like a slowly deflating helium balloon sagging to earth. And if the show intended to make any pertinent commentary on the uselessness or dangerousness of chasing after one’s vanishing youth, it is swallowed up in the glossy production. Ms. Hilty and Ms. Simard are sufficiently seductive performers to hold our attention and affection through their witty work. Their final duet, an anthem of ax-burying solidarity, “Alive Forever,” brings the show to a musically satisfying climax. But while the heroines may achieve eternal life, the musical itself is much closer to forgettable than immortal.
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.
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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