Death Becomes Her
Opening Night: November 21, 2024
Theater: Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
Website: deathbecomesher.com
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.
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November 21, 2024
No matter how many improvements it has made, it is stuck with the foundational problems of the film. But the chance to see two theatrical masterminds go at it for a few hours is sufficient justification for the effort.
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November 21, 2024
Death Becomes Her is a smart, brilliant adaptation that honors the original without fighting too hard at making sure it recreates every moment from the film. It’s clear the team has worked hard to put together one fun night of theatre, and boy do they deliver. I don’t think I stopped smiling from the first downbeat to the final curtain call. It’s high camp and Broadway heaven, need I say more?
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November 21, 2024
The two work together like the ingredients of a dangerous magical potion, each delivering precisely nuanced yet stupendously big performances in amounts that, were they off by so much as a fraction, would thoroughly undo the magic.
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November 21, 2024
Unlike the writers of so many new musicals on Broadway, Pennette, Mattison, Carey, and director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli know exactly what story they’re telling and for whom, making it explicit in the production number “For the Gaze,” which features Hilty executing a dizzying number of costume changes (she’s both Judy and Liza) while sugar-voiced chorus boys tap-dance around her.
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November 21, 2024
The show’s potential shelf-life looks long for New York as well as for the road, ever hungry for a hit.
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November 21, 2024
Even if the musical doesn’t have a discernible heartbeat, Hilty and Simard ensure “Death Becomes Her” stays fun and fabulous.
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November 21, 2024
After this month’s major dud, “Tammy Faye,” where “the gays” are repeatedly pandered to, it’s fun to see a show that talks one on one to its core audience.
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November 21, 2024
They have complementary approaches to pitching jokes: Hilty tends to throw them hard straight over the plate, while Simard favors curveballs. Together they make musical-comedy magic—and musical comedy, when performed this well, never gets old.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2024
Hilty bursts with star power as the glamorous and self-indulged actress Madeline Ashton, and Simard’s dry delivery is hilarious in author Helen Sharp’s meeker getup — and even better after she transforms into a femme fatale to show up Ashton.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2024
The musical adaptation, newly arrived on Broadway after a Chicago tryout, is a laugh riot from start to finish, featuring superb comic performances from its two female leads, a lavish physical production that actually reflects the astronomical (reportedly $31.5 million) production cost, and a book featuring more zingy one-liners than a Friars Club Roast.
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November 21, 2024
What’s on blatant view might too quickly prompt the tandem questions, “Can you believe that—a musical version of Death Becomes Her? What’re they thinking?”
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2024
Death Becomes Her has been reborn on Broadway as a rousing, raucously entertaining hit, the kind of big, box-ticking blockbuster that one can see sticking around for a long time.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 21, 2024
The fact that the new Broadway show did away with the movie’s super campy opener of Meryl Streep’s “Me” — the film’s only musical number, incidentally — and replaced it with the even campier “For the Gaze” tells you everything you need to know about the new production and its mission to go bigger and bawdier at every turn.
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November 21, 2024
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.
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