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It’s Musicals Week at IndieWire. With “Wicked” about to sparkle over theaters, we’re celebrating the best of the movie-musical genre.
The special effects in “Death Becomes Her” are legendary. Seeing Meryl Streep’s broken, twisted body or Goldie Hawn with a gunshot wound straight through her open stomach are unforgettable movie moments in a sharp satire about aging, Hollywood, and vanity.
When it came to adapting the 1992 cult comedy for the stage, then, fans likely had one big question: How, exactly, will the musical translate those scenes into live, onstage spectacle without the help of movie CGI?
Two words: Pole vaulter.
“I think so many people were walking in like, how they gonna do that?,” director/choreographer Christopher Gattelli told IndieWire about an iconic moment when vain, now-dead movie star Madeline Ashton falls down the stairs. “We had months of like, throwing dummies down stairs. [If you can] think of it, we tried it. And there was something about the process of it that just was like, ‘But we’re not embracing what makes theater, theater‘; it should be a live person.”
He continued, “And then Warren Yang, one of my dancers from ‘Schmigadoon,’ he was cast, and he happens to be this Olympic-trained gymnast as well, and it made a ‘ding’ go off in my head. And I was like, ‘Would you be interested in doing a parallel bar, pommel horse kind of routine down stairs?’ [laughs] I’m particularly proud of that moment, because I feel like it really surprises the audience in a way that I think they’re not expecting it, and to watch Warren’s execution of it, and the way that sound and lighting and all departments made this moment up. We call it our ‘Phantom’ chandelier moment; we all really went in hard to make this really special.”
It’s just one of many special moments in the delightful “Death Becomes Her” musical, which opened November 21 on Broadway starring musical theater icons Megan Hilty (“Smash”) as Madeline Ashton and Jennifer Simard as Helen Sharp. Michelle Williams (of Destiny’s Child) tackles a revamped (and dance-heavy) take on the mysterious Isabella Rossellini role from the film, now called Viola Van Horn, who develops a magic potion that will keep these two narcissistic frenemies looking 25 … forever.
‘Death Becomes Her’Matthew Murphy“I think a lot of movies to musicals are done because they’re popular, of course, but this one, there was something about it that [felt stage-ready],” he said. “The fact that someone gets pushed down a flight of stairs and someone gets a hole blown through them, there’s just something about it that’s epic in terms of the storytelling that’s larger than life. These women who are at each other, of course they’re going to be singing at and to each other. And it almost feels operatic in a way, to me, in terms of scope. It wasn’t hard to find moments to musicalize and physicalize. It felt very, very, very ripe for the choosing.”
Gattelli has been involved with the show for about 18 months, but the musical (as is typical) has been in development for years and years, originally slated to star Kristin Chenoweth. Thoughtfully updated (no more fat suit) but still just as quippy with a book by Marco Pennette and music and lyrics by Julia Pattison and Noel Carey, “Death Becomes Her” is now even more the buddy comedy it was always destined to be.
“Every show needs a love story,” Gattelli explained. “And in the version that it was [as it was being developed], it was really focused on Madeline. I said, ‘The love story is the two women.’ At the end of the day, and at the end of the show, they realized that they’re the ones who are supposed to be together and I find it very beautiful. And [realizing that] it led to this two-hander, two strong female characters in a buddy-comedy situation. And that’s so rare. There’s ‘Wicked,’ ‘War Paint,’ … We were doing something that hadn’t been done in a long time.”
Enough space for more than one star? Nobody tell Madeline.
“Death Becomes Her” is now on Broadway.
English (US) ·