Not since Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne themselves performed there in 1958, leaving a trail of scrapes and bite marks in their wake, has Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theater housed such equal-billing dragons as the ones Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard play in “Death Becomes Her.” The musical, which opened on Thursday, stars the two comic treasures as lifelong frenemies for whom the “lifelong” part is an understatement. Their animosity is eternal.
That Hilty and Simard make it so jolly is a big relief and a big surprise. The 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie on which the show is based may be a queer camp classic, but its misogynistic ick factor is high. The leads — Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn — are shot leeringly yet unflatteringly, a queasy combo. The violence they do to each other is more vivid than the vanity at its root. What binds them, even in acrimony, goes largely unexplored. And, fatally, the film is not very funny.
For its first 30 minutes, the musical is nothing but. When introduced, Hilty’s Madeline Ashford is a star of a certain age being hoisted by chorus boys in a creaky vehicle called “Me! Me! Me!” Its opening number, “For the Gaze,” establishes her epochal narcissism while also winking, in its title pun, to the material’s cult audience. The staging, by Christopher Gattelli, goes so breathtakingly over the top — costume changes, key changes, cameos by both Liza and Judy — that half the lyrics get lost in the laughs.
Though best known for her vocal chops — fully exploited here in glossy songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey — Hilty is an inventive and beguiling comedian, putting a warm spin on even the meanest zingers. Indeed, one of the improvements in Marco Pennette’s book for the musical is that those zingers seem like love pinches, painful but titillating. They are often self-directed, too, and thus a kind of self-pleasure. When Simard’s Helen Sharp tells Madeline she’s stunning, the diva responds, with evident delight, “Well, thanks to my hair, makeup and neck team.” She also credits “that tapeworm diet.”
Simard is simply brilliant. I say “simply” advisedly; it takes a lot of craft and homework to stand next to Hilty and not be outdone. Happily, her Helen is an astonishing creation of disappointment and disparagement: Dorothy Parker boiled down to a syrup, spitting takedowns like sour candies. “Love her like a twin,” she says of Madeline, in a voice of squeaky chalk. “Who stole my nutrients in the womb.”
The wit of her delivery (she belts well too) helps us see that the pair’s connection is based on mutual admiration that amounts to a sense of completion: Each needs the other to shine. That’s a formula with no room for a man, as Ernest Menville — Helen’s fiancé, later Madeline’s husband — soon discovers. Cursed with that name, and despite Christopher Sieber’s nerdy charm, he is mostly a tool and a prop for the women. At the end of the show, they even upstage his arc’s clever punchline.
What takes up most of the action until then is the surely familiar story of a miracle elixir that reverses aging and obviates death. In the musical, this potion is dispensed by a creature called Viola Van Horn, who emerges at the start of the show from an amethyst geode. As Viola, Michelle Williams, in spectacular gowns by Paul Tazewell, is something of an amethyst geode herself: sparkly, spiky, glassy, mystical. “I have a secret you would die for,” she sings in the show’s first lyrics.
The choice to forefront that theme, a big change from the movie, could have backfired, delaying the plot and elevating to prominence a character it returns to only periodically. But in fact it works well, orienting the audience to the story’s critique of youth at all costs while putting the characters’ nastiness in a broader cultural context.
Well, perhaps “critique” and “cultural context” are too highfalutin for a musical that operates mostly at low comedy levels. Once Viola has transformed the women into glamazombies, the show has no choice but to serve up facsimiles of the movie’s special effects. This is, after all, a brand-extension musical — even the film’s typeface is preserved in the marketing — and as such is obligated to show us how Madeline and Helen go ballistic on each other, with little consequence, after becoming immortal.
Though we therefore get a reasonable re-creation of Madeline’s neck being wrung like a washcloth, and of the plate-size hole shot in Helen’s stomach, the best visual jokes (illusions by Tim Clothier) are those that are natively theatrical. Madeline’s death-fall down a winding staircase is hilariously low-tech, as an obvious double (the astonishing Warren Yang) tags in for Hilty and lands in a pretzeled splat; later, using a simple magician’s trick, her head is separated from her body but keeps talking.
Especially after the inventive first scenes, the show is a bit like that too: It keeps going despite being disconnected. At some point, even though I knew it well, I lost the thread of the story and found myself waiting for the musical numbers. Even then, the more-is-more physical production eventually started to cloy (purple sets by Derek McLane, saturated lighting by Justin Townsend, congested sound by Peter Hylenski), and a feeling of overfamiliarity set in as each new sororal torture was hymned.
Still, Hilty and Simard are tireless, forever pulling vocal drama and line-reading surprises out of their Swarovski-encrusted imaginations. You do not think too often, and probably not as much as you should, about the unfortunate tradition of catfights in Broadway musicals. (Listen to “Bosom Buddies” from “Mame” and “There’s Always a Woman” from “Anyone Can Whistle.”) In any case, by the finale — a smart wrap-up equivocally called “The End” — the spicy enmity between Madeline and Helen has long since cooked down to companionate carping. Tending their empty graves, they finally have a common enemy: their own immortality.
I don’t think the musical has to worry about that; 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. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in its next incarnation, the Lunt-Fontanne Theater became the Hilty-Simard.
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