Death Becomes Her (Play)

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    The Choreographer Chris Gattelli Sends Love Letters to His Dance Heroes

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    The dance humor in Christopher Gattelli’s shows, like “Schmigadoon!” and “Death Becomes Her,” is underpinned by affection for musical theater and its excesses.If Christopher Gattelli’s choreography looks familiar, that’s probably the point. A veteran of more than 20 Broadway shows and a devotee of movie musicals, he has an encyclopedic dance brain, a catalog of musical theater references he deploys throughout his work onstage and onscreen. Homage is his calling card.And that makes him a very clever satirist. His two current projects — the stage adaptation of the television show “Schmigadoon!,” in the Broadway Center Stage series at the Kennedy Center in Washington through Sunday; and Broadway’s “Death Becomes Her,” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater — both feature wickedly detailed sendups of “musical theater dance.”For Gattelli, 52, those scare quotes might as well be hugs. Barbed as his dance humor can be, it’s underpinned by his affection for the genre, in spite and because of its excesses and quirks.“It’s easy to get snarky when you’re spoofing something you’re so familiar with,” he said in an interview. “It’s easy to get all the digs in. But I’m truly writing love letters to all of my dance heroes.”In his choreography for “Schmigadoon!” on AppleTV+, he all but addressed those letters by name. For the show’s first season — which followed a 21st-century couple stranded in a world where every day is a Golden Age musical — Gattelli channeled the knee-slapping, heel-clicking ebullience of the choreographers Agnes de Mille and Michael Kidd. For the second season, set in the grittier environs of “Schmicago,” he brought in the pigeon-toed slinkiness of Bob Fosse and the splayed-fingers jazz of Michael Bennett.A scene from “Schmigadoon!” at the Kennedy Center.Matthew Murphy and Evan ZimmermanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: In ‘Death Becomes Her,’ Spiking the Fountain of Youth

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      Hilarious star turns from Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard make the mostly unfunny 1992 film into an intermittently memorable Broadway musical.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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Death Becomes Her’ Frenemies Take Their Youth Potion to Broadway

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      The campy supernatural movie comes to Broadway as a big, bawdy musical starring Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard.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.Forever young: Hilty as the pompous Madeline Ashton and Simard as the unhinged Helen Sharp, roles made famous by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      28 Broadway and Off Broadway Shows to See This Fall

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      New York stages are welcoming Robert Downey Jr., Adam Driver, Audra McDonald and more this season.New York City stages are gearing up for a starry fall, with Robert Downey Jr. making his Broadway debut, Marisa Tomei and Jane Krakowski doing new plays, Adam Driver and Kenneth Branagh leading revivals, and Audra McDonald and Nicole Scherzinger stepping into two of the juiciest roles that musical theater has to offer. The overall abundance — on and Off Broadway — is cheering: Even away from the sparkle of celebrity, there are plenty of tempting shows by plenty of artists we’d be lucky to be in the room with.Broadway‘McNEAL’ Robert Downey Jr. makes his Broadway debut in this new drama by the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar (“Disgraced”), playing an esteemed novelist with a potentially dicey interest in artificial intelligence. This Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Bartlett Sher, has a cast that includes Andrea Martin and Ruthie Ann Miles; Downey appears both live onstage and in a two-dimensional “metahuman digital likeness.” (Sept. 5-Nov. 24, Vivian Beaumont Theater)‘THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA’ Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes had a hit with their last Broadway collaboration, “The Ferryman.” Now they’ve teamed up for this time-toggling Butterworth play about four English sisters whose mother raised them in the 1950s to have showbiz dreams, and who return home in the 1970s as she is dying. Laura Donnelly, a star of “The Ferryman,” leads the capacious cast. (Sept. 11-Dec. 8, Broadhurst Theater)Laura Donnelly, at the piano, leads the cast of Jez Butterworth’s “The Hills of California.”Mark Douet‘YELLOW FACE’ David Henry Hwang’s 2007 satire stars Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) as a fictional version of the playwright, navigating anti-Asian racism in the theater and culture, while — whoops — mistakenly casting a white actor in an Asian role. In 2018, The New York Times named this comedy one of the 25 best American plays of the previous 25 years. Leigh Silverman directs this Roundabout Theater staging. (Sept. 13-Nov. 24, Todd Haimes Theater)‘OUR TOWN’ Kenny Leon brings Thornton Wilder’s microcosmic drama back to Broadway, starring Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”) as the Stage Manager. Zoey Deutch and Ephraim Sykes play the young lovers, Emily Webb and George Gibbs, with Richard Thomas and Katie Holmes as Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Billy Eugene Jones and Michelle Wilson as Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs; and Julie Halston as Mrs. Soames. (Sept. 17-Jan. 19, Barrymore Theater)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Death Becomes Her’ Musical to Open on Broadway This Fall

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      The musical comedy, which is now running in Chicago, stars Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard. It is based on the 1992 film.“Death Becomes Her,” a musical comedy based on the zany 1992 film about two warring women who turn to a magical potion in their quests for eternal youth, will transfer to Broadway this fall.The musical is now in previews at the Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago, where it is scheduled to open on Sunday and to run until June 2.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 23 and to open Nov. 21 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where a revival of “Sweeney Todd” closed this month.The show stars two gifted musical theater comedians, Megan Hilty, best known for television’s “Smash,” opposite Jennifer Simard, last seen on Broadway in “Once Upon a One More Time.” They will play roles originated on film by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn.The stage production will also feature Christopher Sieber (whose comedy chemistry with Simard was last seen on Broadway in the 2021 revival of “Company”) as the man they both desire, and Michelle Williams (of Destiny’s Child) as the potion purveyor.The “Death Becomes Her” musical is being directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, who won a Tony Award for choreographing “Newsies”; the book is by Marco Pennette, who has written and produced television shows including “Ugly Betty”; and the score is by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, who have written and performed in a variety of comedy projects.The lead producer is Universal Theatrical Group, which is the stage division of the movie studio behind the “Death Becomes Her” film. More