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Divas at Dusk: Death Becomes Her as Broadway Camp
The musical adaptation of the Streep-and-Hawn movie is relentlessly eager for you to laugh with and at its dueling lead actresses.
“You really can’t underestimate the entertainment value of two women swinging shovels at each other,” one of its screenwriters, David Koepp, told Vanity Fair, which about sums up why the movie has inspired bits on Drag Race(and, more recently, a Sabrina Carpenter video). She introduces herself with a number from her big Broadway hit, in which she announces that everything she does is “For the Gaze.” In case the pun in Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s songwriting isn’t obvious, Death Becomes Her ’s director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli has Hilty flanked by a crew of chorus boys dressed in the colors of a pride flag, while she races through costume changes to become Liza and Judy—a Toto plushie shoots up into her hands from the orchestra pit. There are jokes about resewing sagging flesh, about trading sex for roles, about product placement at weddings, and about everyone at CAA shitting themselves on a tapeworm diet that directly cribs a quote in New York ’s own story about semaglutides —though Ozempic itself goes surprisingly unmentioned.
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