NEW YORK — “Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star,” says an under-the-knife actress named Madeline Ashton in the 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie “Death Becomes Her.” “Hope they never see the scars.”
One can always hope. “Death Becomes Her,” the musical, has had some major plastic surgery since its Chicago tryout at the Cadillac Palace Theatre last May. As penned by Marco Pennette, with music and lyrics from the rising and talented young team of Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, the show has been nicely nipped, tucked and lifted, and deftly de-flabbed.
Also now without its original creative producer, which qualifies as a scar, this new tenant at the Lunt-Fontanne is of course based on that terminally weird but much-loved movie, clips of which still play nightly at gay bars across America as a reminder of the anarchic days of the early 1990s. When we all laughed a lot more. Look at the hole in Goldie Hawn’s body! See Meryl Streep’s head do a 360! Watch the stars whack away at their torsos! Bartender, pour me another drink!
“Death Becomes Her” arrives on Broadway as a silly, campy, go-for-broke show that’s filled with hearty laughs (especially in the stronger Act 1) and a pair of gutsy, zesty and highly skilled lead performances from Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard that land right where a good chunk of the Broadway-going public believe divas like these two should be landing. While looking fabulous. The aim here appears to have been to create a kind of pseudo-feminist, gayer version of “The Producers,” and while those heights are not scaled, the Mel Brooksian template is enthusiastically employed, especially within Mattison and Carey’s patter-heavy ditties and droll lyrics.
Nothing about this show is remotely subtle and it could not give a fig about dramaturgical rule-keeping, but Hilty and Simard feel every inch of the roles of withering frenemies.
Hilty’s Madeline, if your memory fails you, is an aging actress who turns to a sorceress (played in the show by Michelle Williams) for a potion of eternal youth. Cheating her natural aging allows Madeline to be revenged on her homlier old friend and rival Helen (Simard) who, don’tcha know, has been to the same useful mystic. The pair battle to gain advantage over both their aging bodies and the same lover, a plastic surgeon played by Christopher Sieber. Sieber’s Ernest knows how to discombobulate women as well as smooth their wrinkles, but his presence here as an object of such fevered desire is, well, as wacky as most everything else on the stage. (Some of the most sexist gags in the movie, including a fat suit, have been rightly trashed.)
Director Christopher Gattelli was determined to deliver the special effects from the movie and the show does so as one big self-aware joke, best typified by extended body-double sequences of prat falling wherein the stand-ins first obscure their face and then drop that conceit mid-gig as if they’d just decided, oh what the hell, everybody already knows it’s not them.
How you feel about that (I laughed my socks off) probably will determine what you think of the whole thing. “Death Becomes Her” is all about good-time seekers having fun with a fresh, live and mercifully arch take on beloved but wheezing material, so politically incorrect as to fail the entire class. To buy a ticket will for many be like putting on a silly sweater from those je ne regrette rien 1990s days and blowing bank on a retro cocktail at intermission, with one hidden under a coat for Act 2.
Like most musicals based on caper movies, Act 2 suffers from too much plot and the show still lacks an eleven-o’clock number for Hilty, perhaps because the show wants to keep everything equitable. But Gattelli has given the show a classy polish and, aside from those pros Hilty and Simard, he also cast fine character players (Taureann Everett as Chagall and Josh Lamon, who is very droll at Madeline’s assistant Stefan), not to mention a lithe dancing ensemble who glam up the proceedings and do not mess around.
This twin-protagonist musical (a la “Wicked,” “Side Show” and “War Paint”) could have gone in more of a sketch-comedy direction (a la “Titanique”), but shooting for the richer big-musical shebang clearly was the better way to go, especially given Gattelli’s choreographic chops. The production values (sets are from Derek McLane) are lush and Paul Tazewell’s fabulous array of costumes get deserved roars every time there’s a change. Whatever criticism gets hurled its way, nobody could reasonably say that “Death Becomes Her” looks cheap or lacks entertainment value.
Hilty and Simard have a much stronger emotional connection than was evident in Chicago and Siebert does his darndest with a tricky character to define, let alone credibly play. For her elegant part, Williams plays it very straight and I’m all for her laconic and generous sense of humor that doesn’t pull focus away from the two stars of the show, both of whom here find endless ways to whack each other to bits and yet remain standing. I suspect this show, a cathartic distraction from the weariness of the times, will manage the same.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W. 46th St., New York; deathbecomesher.com
