Death Becomes Her – 29 April 2024

Death Becomes Her is a show that didn’t work for me, but I’m having a hard time explaining why. The design elements were flawless and beautiful. Each actor gave a standout performance and I believed that I was seeing characters, not actors. The story was elaborate. The funny lines made me laugh out loud. I enjoyed the concept. What happened is, a couple of little things took me out of it, but they repeated frequently enough that I kept falling out of engagement with the show.

One of these minute annoyances was that I couldn’t understand a word when Jennifer Simard and Megan Hilty sang together. Both have highly stylized voices that make their solo moments pop and add a lot to their respective characters, but their voices don’t match together well and when they share a moment the words are lost to each’s excessive vibrato. The ensemble sang a little, but I couldn’t hear them over the band. It didn’t help that the overexcited audience clapped at every entrance and button such that at times it was the fans drowning out the show (though this is not the fault of the production).

Choreography, costumes, lighting, and scenic design stood out as particularly impressive. The writing could use some polish, but the concepts were clear. The character arcs were lovely. In particular, I enjoyed Ernest Menville (Christopher Sieber)’s transition from apathetic to broken down and desperate. He embodied how the majority of the world reacts to undying, flawless beauty— enamored at first, stymied by its impossibility, seeking to bask in its limelight, then rejecting it and wanting to live a life of meaning and purpose. Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty), Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard), and Viola Van Horn (Michelle Williams) are fun because they don’t ever come out of chasing eternal youth. They portray the cruelty that often comes with the vanity of beauty, in a way that makes the audience both laugh and cringe. 

The story is campy more than anything— it doesn’t make the audience feel. Death Becomes Her is nothing more and nothing less than the perfect guilty pleasure musical. It is thoroughly entertaining, not especially meaningful, but jam packed with fun twists and turns and a couple of moments that truly feel like magic.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.