Faustian Bargains in “Death Becomes Her” and “Burnout Paradise”

In a Faustian bargain, there’s little suspense about how things will end. The Devil doesn’t hand anything over—beauty, knowledge, power—without first laying down some heavy hints. And so it goes as the lights dim for the musical “Death Becomes Her,” by the songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey and the book writer Marco Pennette, at the Lunt-Fontanne. As thunder rumbles and lightning flickers, Isabella Rossellini’s disembodied voice, insinuating and delicious, purrs a warning: “Silence your cell phones.”

The camp-o-meter is already overloading, and the show, directed by Christopher Gattelli, hasn’t even begun. (Soon to come: a quick change for an actress into a Judy Garland-as-Dorothy costume, complete with a stuffed Toto tossed up into her arms from the orchestra pit.) Rossellini is not physically in this show—she played the Mephistopheles figure in the Robert Zemeckis film, from 1992, on which the musical is based—but her vocal cameo reverberates. As with so many of these adaptations of movies, the makers want to summon our nostalgia for the source, without necessarily jogging our memory of its flaws.

The narrative bones of the Zemeckis film, which starred Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as homicidal frenemies, remain intact. The self-obsessed actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty, escaping Streep’s ice-queen shadow by running hot) greets her old chum and rival, the drab wannabe writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard), backstage after a Broadway show. Madeline instantly hankers after Helen’s fiancé, the plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Christopher Sieber), and, when Ernest allows himself to be stolen away, Helen snaps.

She reappears years later, in Los Angeles, after a (magically) extreme makeover, and the two women do battle. Michelle Williams, from Destiny’s Child, plays Rossellini’s part, the witchy purveyor of an elixir of eternal youth, which she sells to both Madeline and Helen. Freshly gorgeous and now unkillable, the two women inflict “Looney Tunes”-level damage on each other, and Ernest finds himself forced into service as a kind of pit-stop mechanic, spackling gunshot holes and spray-painting dead flesh.

The musical retains touches of the film’s dialogue, which was written by Martin Donovan and David Koepp: certainly no one would dare cut the deathless gibe “En garde, bitch,” first snarled by Hawn as she and Streep brandished shovels at each other. A zillion other jokes—many of them packed into Mattison and Carey’s deft, sometimes filthy or fourth-wall-breaking lyrics—are new, though, each one given thrilling life by Hilty and Simard. “Love her like a twin—who stole my nutrients in the womb,” Helen murmurs to Ernest, explaining her “friendship” with Madeline. For her part, Madeline is unapologetically self-serving. “Let’s look at me!” she trills at every opportunity.

Both actresses are Tony-nominated comic divas of the first order. Hilty, a superb, silvery soprano, is basically playing Madeline as Miss Piggy in Mae West mode, abetted by the costume designer Paul Tazewell, who briefly puts her in a leopard-print peignoir-and-pant outfit just so she can match her leopard-print couch. (Derek McLane designed the set, which recalls a Gothic pop-up book, often lit, by Justin Townsend, in deep electric purples.) Meanwhile, Simard’s paranormal upgrade turns her into Rita Hayworth in “Gilda,” if Gilda had occasionally played her own breasts, bongo style, for emphasis. A veteran of “Forbidden Broadway,” and one of our finest physical comedians, Simard has developed a stunning Bernadette Peters impression, and we hear a brassy whisper of that in her no-holds-barred performance, which also includes deadpan shadings of Madeline Kahn and—especially when Simard does a weird little broken-robot toddle—Kate McKinnon.

Gattelli’s production makes a pact with us early on. It will use body doubles for special effects—from tricks played in Madeline’s first big dance number, we know that if she turns her back we should assume we’re watching a doppelgänger—and we will choose not to notice. By the time the cartoonish violence begins, we’re delighted for the stage “magic” to be as obvious as possible. In Zemeckis’s C.G.I.-larded movie, a gruesome fall down a marble staircase required various cinematic interventions. Here, good old stagecraft suffices: Madeline enters from offstage, curiously unwilling to move her hair out of her face, and then “Madeline” somersaults tumble-bumble-CRACK down the stairs in slow motion. This is part of the fun—we look at a patently fake surface and collectively agree it’s the real thing.

Speaking of that ability, it’s not “Death Becomes Her” ’s fault that you cannot swing a mascara wand on Broadway right now without hitting a woman who hates her face. “Tammy Faye” is crying makeup all over the Palace; Norma Desmond, in the new version of “Sunset Blvd.,” is weeping blood. In movie theatres, the body-horror film “The Substance” imagines that Demi Moore would rather rip off her skin than see it in closeup. Clearly, “icon” status for women of a certain age requires them to turn gorgon, at which point the audience can scream both for and at them. Crepey skin—so monstrous! Smoothed skin—so uncanny! It’s humiliation disguised as elevation, the all too common Faustian deal that’s made when a woman over forty lands a good part.

Still, “Death Becomes Her” fights hard to keep its bitter humor sweet. The musical takes several important strides away from the original: it cuts the fat jokes, and it recalculates the central relationship. (Also, because neither woman actually changes much on taking the potion, the secret to supernatural glamour here seems to be avoiding a bob haircut.) Most important, instead of binding Madeline and Helen together as a kind of hellish punishment, this team reimagines them as, eventually, discovering that they are soul mates. “You’re my person,” Madeline sings, finally, as Ernest falls by the wayside. “Oh no,” Helen protests, but you can tell she’s going to come on board. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Simard has recorded her own podcast about “The Golden Girls,” that canonical text on aging in America. Simard’s shoulders square into a familiar Bea Arthur line, as Hilty flutters at her à la Rue McClanahan. We would spend another hundred hours with these gals if given the chance, so why would they blink at eternity?

“Burnout Paradise,” at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, also strikes a bargain with its audience, but it’s rather more explicitly laid out. Four actors in the Australian experimental collective Pony Cam introduce themselves and their treadmills, each labelled with an aspect of life that they struggle to keep in balance: Survival, Admin, Performance, and Leisure. In rotating ten-minute bursts on the machines, the actors—Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub, and Hugo Williams—attempt four ambitious tasks (on the Survival treadmill, preparing a three-course meal; on Admin, completing and submitting a grant application) while jogging. If they can’t hit their goals and surpass their collective personal-best mileage, the time-keeper, Ava Campbell, promises our money back.

I watched most of this goofy show applauding, quietly and delightedly. No one could hear me, because the room was in utter mayhem. The actors require the audience’s constant assistance: when, racing along on Leisure, Williams needed someone to wash his hair, a guy hopped up to help; other theatregoers were dashing forward to offer Weintraub their C.V.s to beef up the grant application. I hate to overclaim for a show that’s seemingly just a very silly, very escapist hour with a bunch of clowns. But lately I have been feeling a little burned out, too. I found it hugely useful to be reminded of two things. First, whether it’s ten minutes or four years, time passes more quickly when you’re counting it down together. And, second, if a group of strangers can rally for a bit of collective action, they have a chance at beating the clock—not to mention the Devil. ♦