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.
Starring Tony Award® nominees Megan Hilty (Wicked, “Smash”), Jennifer Simard (Company, Disaster!), and Christopher Sieber (Spamalot, Company), with Grammy® Award winner Michelle Williams (Destiny’s Child, Chicago), Death Becomes Her, based on the classic 1992 film, is a drop-dead hilarious new musical comedy about friendship, love, and burying the hatchet…again, and again, and again.
Life’s a bitch and then you die. Or not!
This clever show was written by Marco Pennette and directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, and features music and lyrics from the very talented newcomer team of Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. It has some crowd-pleasing strengths, including a genuinely funny book, a swirling, retro, filmic score that features a knockout two-pronged 11 o’clock number for Hilty and Simard, and its best numbers put you in mind of Burt Bacharach and John Barry (no Ingrid Michaelson-like experiments here to confound future Tony Award nominators). There’s a lush physical production from set designer Derek McLane in an old school, drape-heavy “Producers”-like mode and a stellar cast. (Most unusually for this size of Broadway musical, there are just four designated principal roles, so the talented members of the ensemble surely earn their paychecks.) But there’s much work to be done overall if the show is to appeal to people who don’t have prior affection for the source.
This is without question an entertaining show that knows exactly what it is and delivers, and that, appealingly, possesses a joie de vivre that accompanies its deathly black humor. But the genre of the broadly comic adult musical has seen more commercial underperformers (e.g., “Shucked,” “Escape to Margaritaville,” “Honeymoon in Vegas”) than hits (e.g. “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Book of Mormon”). The stellar star-turns should make an initial difference – Hilty and Simard are genuinely phenomenal here – and continued sharpening of the emotional undercurrents could make a more lasting impression as long as the camp appeal doesn’t collapse from too much caring.
2024 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
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