How will they do the fall down the staircase? What about the neck and body moving in opposing directions, the beheading, the bullet-hole through the stomach, the general camp lunacy that flows through the original movie?
Resounding answer: Brilliantly, imaginatively, fabulously.
The relentless, deliciously played, perfectly directed hilarity of Death Becomes Her (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, booking through August 31, 2025) distinguishes this skillfully executed riot of a Broadway musical. Based on the 1992 movie starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis, the musical sees life-long frenemies Madeline (Megan Hilty) and Helen (Jennifer Simard) fight to beyond-death in their body-punishing and mangling struggles to stay young and beautiful, and to one-up each other.
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The excellent Hilty and Simard revel in the comedy on the page, then garnish it even more lavishly and outrageously. It’s a cheek-aching laughter rollercoaster. (See also Hilty’s Playbill entry for the show, filched from Streep’s own CV—it sets the tone.)
Ernest, the man their characters fight over—although they ultimately concede that this is a futile, stupid battle—is played by the excellent Christopher Sieber, who knows his hangdog, to-be-insulted place, leaving the two women center stage.
Michelle Williams, formerly of Destiny’s Child, plays the statuesque and mysterious Viola Van Horn, who administers the mysterious elixirs that grant the women eternal life. As the show’s tagline goes: “Life’s a bitch, and then you die—or not.”
Christopher Gattelli, who directs and choreographs this fabulous show, matches the technical distinctiveness of Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 movie with equally original visual effects, alongside ridiculously over-the-top song and dance numbers like Hilty’s opening “For the Gaze.” Here, the homophone of that third word is the point of the song—and aimed at a large constituency of the audience, watching Madeline launch into a rabble-rousing reverie about her own brilliance.
Paul Tazewell might have reasonably been assumed to have left all the grandeur of his 2024 costume-making on the field of the Wicked movie—but no, his creations of Death Becomes Her comprise a whole new gallery of gorgeous luxe absurdity—rhinestones, boas, co-ordinated ballgowns and umbrellas, ruching, big shoulders, bold colors, sequins, and barely-there bodycon for the dancers.
Derek McLane’s sets are similarly maximalist and cartoon-gothic, including the sweeping staircase of Madeline’s mansion, where she meets what doesn’t turn out to be her fate, and the subterranean, pillared Studio 54 that is Viola’s lair. (As Viola, Williams shimmers, but seems a little stiffer than her go-big-no-bigger co-stars.)
Marco Pennette’s book is a barrage of silly, clever, sly, and giggle-inducing zingers, with Hilty and Simard relishing the delivery of every one. Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s music and lyrics—a just-as-wittily written combination of toe-tappers and ballads—amp up the waspish bitching and wit even further.
If Death Becomes Her has an underlying question, it is, as Viola states in the show’s prologue, to interrogate “life’s ultimate cruelty—to give us a precious few years of youth and beauty and then force us to witness our own decay. Now some people might say that is the natural law. But those people probably don’t have money.”
However, the musical—written, pre-Botox, pre-Ozempic, and when plastic surgery was itself exotic and not to be readily owned up to—proudly states that it has no great point to make. It is a hysterical, maximalist satire on our obsession with looks, not an earnest treatise on the same.
The swings and roundabouts of the women’s lives begin rotating wildly from the outset, with Madeline the beautiful screen-queen mean girl, and Helen the dowdier, quieter one—except we see her claws early when she notes of Madeline’s Hollywood success, “No one could throw her legs wider—higher—than her.”
“I love Mad. Love her like a twin,” she adds. “Who stole my nutrients in the womb.”
When Madeline’s assistant Stefan (an excellent Josh Lamon, both devoted and desperate to escape her) says not to forget the Make-A-Wish kid seeing her the next day, Madeline asks if they can put it off a week, leading to a pause and a nervous “Well” from Stefan.
“When I’m working I’m on a pretty strict regimen,” Madeline says. “Dance classes, salads with no dressing, cocaine...”
The campy excess of the movie is mirrored on stage, with years spinning by: Helen losing Ernest to Madeline, Helen invading their wedding then going nuts in a psych ward, Madeline losing her looks and career, and becoming the “before” face of a skin cream advertisement.
Helen becomes a success herself, and glamorously transformed from mouse to siren. Reuniting with Helen at her book launch, she notes, “My publicist said Madeline Ashton will go to the opening of an envelope. Then I said, ‘It’s just a shame when they open it, they never read her name.’”
Simard’s most roar-worthy line is the laconically delivered, low and monotone response to Madeline asking if she takes sleeping pills: “My best friend stole my fiancé, I wound up in a psych ward and spent my life savings on a magic potion. So, yeah, I have some trouble sleeping.”
It turns out Viola’s age-defying serum guarantees eternal life, which itself becomes a nightmare, when—through ever more extreme acts of violence (the fall down those stairs, a beheading, a gunshot through the midsection)—the women discover they can’t die.
Visually, this gasp-provoking set of sequences—conceived by Gattelli, fight arranger Cha Ramos, and Paul Clothier, whose illusions on stage match the tech wizardry of the big screen movie—add further layers of comedy and spectacle.
As Ernest whispers in horror when he realizes what is unfolding (and what this means for a life he wants to share with neither nightmare diva): “They’re dead, but they’re alive!”
“I woke up and I was in this tiny space and it was pitch black and I started screaming but no one cared,” Madeline says of her experience of temporarily being installed in the morgue. “It was like when I did that Black Box Theater in Miami... We had to wash our own costumes.” (It’s that payoff that takes the joke from 9.9 to a 10—a perfect gilding of the lily.)
A very funny repeated joke sees Sieber cut off by the women any time he sings his heart out—his final exit is accompanied by them literally shooing him off the stage: “NO! You don’t get the happy ending! That’s so unfair! Boooo!! Go! Get outta here old man!”
That leaves the two women, unkillable (even if they are both officially dead and observing their own graves), stuck together resignedly and somewhat happily—each other’s dedicated person, one ready to help fix whatever peeling bit of skin may drop off the other. As Helen sings: “I don’t have the core strength to hold on to grudges any more.”
At the end the women ask, as we ourselves might wonder, about the possibility of discovering “if there was a moral to our story.”
Magnificently—and absolutely correctly in this outrageous delight of a musical—the answer is no.
The Blood Quilt
Beautiful quilts and a roiling sea are the backdrop of Katori Hall’s affecting play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz (Lincoln Center Theater, booking to Dec. 29). It is 2015, and the Jernigan sisters—Clementine (Crystal Dickinson), Cassan (Susan Kelechi Watson), Amber (Lauren E. Banks), and Gio (Adrienne C. Moore)—have gathered for their annual reunion at their family’s home off the coast of Georgia, with Zambia (Mirirai), Cassan’s daughter, there to supply some youthful energy and chaos.
The property is on Kwemera Island (Kwemera means “to last, endure, withstand”), and the women are making a quilt in memory of their deceased mother whose beautiful works dominate the backdrop of Adam Riggs’ lovely stage design. Inevitably, a host of secrets, grievances, and emotional turmoil are bubbling away ready to explode, especially when the women read their mother’s will—and property and money enter the thematic fray.
There are strong performances, and bigger themes thrumming alongside the familial—home, heritage, history, and race—but the play is also (at 2 hours 40 minutes) too long and too stuffed with yet-another-personal-drama. Banks and Moore are exceptional as the two sisters in greatest conflict (one quietly focused, the other loud and brash), and it is the sea—and its spirits dancing on its ocean floor—that ultimately signposts the women to some kind of future.
Babe
This lackluster drama (New Group/Signature Theatre, to Dec. 22) stars Marisa Tomei as Abby, a female music executive mulling her relationship with #MeToo-related matters while also in the throes of serious illness. A new, younger female colleague, Katherine (Gracie McGraw), brings matters to a head when she enters the workplace and determinedly challenges the sexism and worse of aging male executive Gus (Arliss Howard).
While some of the scenes between the younger and older woman—discussing experiences, ambition, complicity, and generational and gender betrayal—are arrestingly played, they are by now hardly new and come with little fresh insight. However, the women’s shared dance (the music in the show is by Betty) is the coolest boogie on the New York stage right now.
