To be a marquee name after the ingénue years and to feel validated in a cutthroat business: For many actresses on Broadway or anywhere, those can be constant cravings. For Megan Hilty, one of the stars of the new Broadway musical “Death Becomes Her,” they’re urgent themes.
“I have this number in the show that’s quite funny,” Hilty said during a recent interview. “But also it taps into something unbearably honest about the lengths to which women, mostly, can torture themselves thinking: How far am I willing to go to be what this world and industry wants and needs me to be in order to feel relevant?”
But this isn’t the earnest-minded “Suffs,” not by a long shot.
“Death Becomes Her” is a big, bawdy musical of to-the-rafters power ballads, va-va-voom costumes, zippy one-liners and vogueing chorus boys. It’s based on Robert Zemeckis’s supernatural horror comedy, from 1992, about two women — Madeline Ashton, a pompous actress played by Meryl Streep, and Helen Sharp, an unhinged novelist played by Goldie Hawn — who become frenemy immortals after they drink a potion that a mysterious glamourpuss named Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini) assures them will impart eternal youth.
No spoiler alert: It does, but it’s not pretty. Rotting flesh never is.
The show comes to Broadway after a Chicago run last spring that received mostly good reviews, with much of the praise saved for Hilty and her co-star, Jennifer Simard, who plays Helen to Hilty’s Madeline. As with any Broadway transfer, the show’s creative team, led by its director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli, has spent months futzing — finessing new illusions, adding a new second-act song, redesigning costumes.
What hasn’t changed is that Madeline seduces and marries Helen’s husband, Ernest, played by Christopher Sieber (Bruce Willis in the film). And the show still has, as Simard put it, its “nougaty center”: A story about two women who make a ghastly but farcical Faustian bargain that’s rooted in private shame and universal heartache over youth, beauty and self-worth.
“The audience knows what pain and insecurity feel like,” Simard said, sitting next to Hilty during a recent interview at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where the show is in previews before a Nov. 21 opening. “There’s comedy to come out of those things.”
As for playing Madeline, Hilty’s bright countenance betrayed a frank assessment of her character’s dark truths.
“A lot of what some would think is bad behavior, to me is just a product of her deepest, darkest insecurities about growing old in an industry that is relentlessly unforgiving,” she said, “like it’s offensive to be an aging woman.”
Joining Simard and Hilty for the interview were Sieber and Michelle Williams, the singer and former Destiny’s Child member who stars as Viola van Horn, as Rossellini’s character is now called. Williams said in finding her way into the character, she reined in her performance, not to avoid overacting — how else would an elixir-hawking ancient goddess-demoness come across? — but out of fear that she might sound like she’s on the wrong stage.
“As a musician who likes to sing all kinds of notes and chords, I’m restraining myself,” said Williams, who was last seen on Broadway in 2018 in “Once on This Island.” “This is Broadway. This ain’t church, nor is this the R&B pop stage. I don’t want nobody to be like, Honey, she thought this was a Michelle Williams, Destiny’s Child concert, and it’s not.”
“We kind of want it to be,” Hilty whispered with a smile, extending her hand out to Williams.
“I understand,” Williams replied, reaching back.
“Death Becomes Her” is a show business cautionary tale as old as “All About Eve,” but also as recent as the radical Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” and the gonzo body-horror film “The Substance” — new dramas that employ nightmarish scenarios and grotesquely bloody finales to explore what it means for actresses, and women generally, to age.
As a musical, “Death Becomes Her” does this too — not with gruesomeness but with a punchy book by Marco Pennette, a television veteran who was a co-creator of the series “Caroline in the City” and a writer for “Ugly Betty” and other sitcoms. Pennette said he had a simple goal: to get people “to jump and to laugh.”
Horror movies have a name for that.
“A jump scare lives in the same place as a laugh,” explained Julia Mattison who, with Noel Carey, wrote the show’s score, their first for Broadway. “It’s a breath, it’s a quick” — here she inhaled sharply — “and you get an adrenaline shot.”
Mattison and Carey are young and untested names on Broadway, but they may be familiar to followers of New York’s downtown actor-writer-composer circles. Although their music is new, they understand, as does Pennette, that fans are going to make comparisons to the source material, an inevitability when any film is adapted for the stage.
Eyeballs will be especially trained on how Universal Theatrical Group, the live theater division of Universal, the studio behind the film, handled the making of the musical.
Lowe Cunningham, the division’s vice president of creative development and production, said Pennette had a long-running relationship with Universal Studios and was already on board when she started hearing from some of Broadway’s heavy-hitter composers who wanted to work on “Death Becomes Her.” Cunningham said that even though Carey and Mattison were rookie Broadway composers “nobody had heard of,” they were selected in part because having a woman’s voice on the writing team would be helpful in shaping how the characters “look at female friendship.”
And, she added, because Universal Theatrical Group, which musicalized “Shrek” and “Bring It On” for Broadway, felt “there is room for discovery of new talent.”
“I said we have to give them a shot,” Cunningham explained. “If we got it wrong, and they can’t write, then we’ve lost a year. But there was something special there.”
“Death Becomes Her” has built a devoted fan base in the decades since the film opened at No. 1 to mixed reviews and modest box office sales. (It was a dud compared with Zemeckis’s previous hits “Back to the Future” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”) With catty leading lady characters and camp in its blood, the film is a queer movie touchstone, even inspiring a runway challenge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Simard said what fans of the film should not expect to see are impressions of Streep or Hawn. “It’s not ‘Forbidden Broadway,’” Simard said of the long-running satirical franchise.
It wouldn’t be “Death Becomes Her” without one of the film’s most memorable scenes, a literal twist that would seem to defy stagecraft. (The film’s CGI, groundbreaking at the time, won an Academy Award for best visual effects.) It happens when Madeline is pushed down a grand flight of stairs, a seemingly fatal nudge when she lands with a thud. But having already swallowed the magic potion, she gets up — though her head is on backward, making her look as if she’s both coming and going.
Gattelli said he and his creative team worked at a breakneck pace to come up with a theatrical solution that looked convincing and was “graphic but at the same time witty.”
“After literally throwing dummies down the stairs, at the end of the day I was like, this is live theater and it’s a person,” he said.
At a recent rehearsal, Gattelli watched as Warren Yang, the show’s acrobatics captain and a former member of the Canadian national gymnastics team, slipped on heels and used his considerable flexibility, upper-body strength and lithe extension to demonstrate in slow-motion how Madeline plummets down the staircase.
A strategically placed wig, loud cracking sound effects and a hidden switcheroo complete the trick. (More intel would spoil the spell work.) By the end, Yang looked pooped.
Gattelli didn’t reveal the sausage-making behind recreating the film’s other big visual gag, in which Madeline shoots Helen with such force that Helen is hurled into a pool, emerging with a giant hole in her midsection. But at a recent preview, that scene and another, in which Helen knocks Madeline’s head offstage with a shovel, got the performance’s most rousing cheers.
The producers found a kindred macabre spirit in Gattelli, a horror fan and a Tony Award-winning choreographer (for “Newsies the Musical”) who cut his teeth working on darkly comic Off Broadway musicals including “Altar Boyz,” “Bat Boy,” “Silence! The Musical” — shows that “find the funny in the darkness,” as he put it.
But as any horror movie geek knows, darkness eventually gives way to light. (Usually.) Sieber said he hoped “Death Becomes Her” would appeal to theatergoers who like comedy that goes for broke and prefer horror to be of the pretend variety.
“Last season on Broadway there were a lot of lessons to be learned, a lot of, hey that’s not right, let’s fix this, and that’s fine,” he said. “But I think we’re ready to laugh now for two and a half hours. If you’re coming to ‘Death Becomes Her’ for a lesson, you’re missing the point completely.”
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