On Broadway, death does not take a holiday
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Images of theater and death are entwined in the opening lines of 'My Way,' which became a signature song for Frank Sinatra, with its karaoke-ready opening lines: 'And now, the end is near/ And so I face the final curtain…'
The fact that so many current Broadway shows are taking a peek behind that curtain could be nothing more than coincidence, a case of a bunch of death-themed shows making their way through the developmental pipeline and arriving on Broadway at the same time, though it's an unusually large number.
Or perhaps the current prevalence of death-as-leitmotif on Broadway stages represents a theatrical response to the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down playhouses for 18 months and forced millions to confront their own mortality while, not so incidentally, causing the deaths of more than a million people in the United States.
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Or maybe it's yet another illustration of the baby boom generation's market power. More than 70 million strong, and now in their 60s and 70s, boomers form the core of the theater audience. They have always sought nontraditional approaches to music, marriage, fashion, parenting, careers — and now, perhaps, death? Are they counting on theater to provide them with a way to think about what is not an abstract matter anymore — and, in some cases, even enable them to laugh at what they most fear?
Whatever the reason(s),
The cast of "Death Becomes Her."
Matthew Murphy
Consider the bonkers musical spectacle that is 'Death Becomes Her' (10 nominations, including one for best musical). Directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, this stage adaptation is superior to the 1992 Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn movie that inspired it.
In a nation obsessed with youth, frenemies Madeline Ashton (
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In the raucous, darkly comedic musical 'Dead Outlaw,' which is inspired by a true story and earned seven nominations, death serves less as an ending than a context. Only two songs into the show comes a song titled 'Dead,' with the cast ferociously blasting out the lines at the audience against a driving rock 'n' roll beat: 'Your mama's dead! John Gotti's dead! Dillinger's dead! And so are you! Balzac is dead! Tupac is dead! Anne Frank is dead! And so are you, and so are you!'
And so is a train robber named Elmer McCurdy (Andrew Durand), slain by a posse. So Elmer's story is concluded, right? Nope. For decades after his death, Elmer's mummified corpse is presented for public viewing in a carnival sideshow, an amusement-park funhouse, and a wax museum, among other venues — a posthumous journey that combines a gruesome kind of afterlife with a bizarre form of celebrity.
Fittingly, the strongest part of Durand's Tony-nominated performance occurs after Elmer is deceased. The actor's ability to 'play dead' while propped up vertically in a casket is extraordinary. You sit in the audience, sometimes ignoring the other actors onstage as you search for a sign that Durand is breathing. That sign never comes.
In the entrancing 'Maybe Happy Ending' (10 nominations ), Oliver (Darren Criss), a helper robot in South Korea, begins to develop human feelings for another robot, Claire (Helen J. Shen). He enlists her in his search for his kindly
former owner, only to discover the heartbreaking downside of being immortal — when someone you love is not.
Jon Michael Hill, left, and Harry Lennix in "Purpose."
Marc J. Franklin, 2025
In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 'Purpose' (six nominations), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last month, Solomon 'Sonny' Jasper (Harry Lennix), preacher, civil rights legend, and the patriarch of a prominent Black family, is cold and remote until the sudden death of his bee colony brings out his vulnerable humanity. 'I really loved those bees,' Sonny says somberly.
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In 'Buena Vista Social Club' (10 nominations), Omara, a famous Cuban singer played with magisterial command
by Natalie Venetia Belcon, resists the entreaties of a record producer that she resume her career — a career she abandoned six years earlier when her estranged but beloved sister died. That sister fled to the United States after Fidel Castro took over in Cuba; Omara remained.
Issues of morality as well as mortality surface in 'Operation Mincemeat' (four nominations), a musical comedy based on real events in World War II. British intelligence operatives plant false documents on a dead body and place him on a beach to mislead Nazi Germany about the invasion plans of the Allies. (Among the operatives is a chap named Ian Fleming, who is hard at work on a novel about a fellow named James Bond.)
One of the operatives jokingly refers to 'a Trojan corpse,' but at another point in the musical, the tone shifts into a much more somber key as the operatives question what they are doing — exploiting the death of a fellow human being, and treating him as an object, a chess piece. 'Have we done a bad thing?,' one of them asks.
In 'Sunset Boulevard' (seven nominations), faded silent-movie star Norman Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger, earning a Tony nomination in her Broadway debut), mad with jealousy, fatally shoots her lover, screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tony nominee Tom Francis).
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In 'Oh, Mary!' (five nominations), one of the most famous deaths in American history is — let's say
reimagined
: its cause, its perpetrator, the whole thing.
The comic genius Cole Escola has concocted a fever dream of a show about a bibulous Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola) and a gay Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora). ('Oh, Mary!' is nominated for best play and Escola is nominated for best actor in a play.) Mary is determined to resume her career in cabaret; as part of that effort, she hires an acting coach named … John Wilkes Booth (James Scully). Matters proceed from there, in an unexpected way.
The musical 'Floyd Collins' (six nominations) is about the death of cave explorer Floyd Collins, played by Tony nominee Jeremy Jordan. The nation was transfixed by the ultimately unsuccessful operation to rescue Collins when he was trapped underground by a fallen boulder in a Kentucky cave in 1925.
Half a dozen characters die by suicide, murder, or accident in the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (six nominations, including one for star Sarah Snook of 'Succession,' who plays all 26 roles in the one-woman show).
The body count is often high with Shakespeare, but the Tony count added up to zero for the high-profile Broadway production of 'Othello,' with Denzel Washington in the title role and Jake Gyllenhaal playing the treacherous Iago. It received not a single Tony nomination.
Also shut out by Tony voters was 'Redwood,' in which a New York gallerist played by Idina Menzel ('Wicked'), locked in deep mourning for her son who died of a drug overdose, leaves her wife and takes a cross-country trip that lands her in the redwood forests of Northern California. There, she finds a kind of community and a chance to begin to heal.
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Everyone is still alive, at least physically, at the end of 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' the revival of David Mamet's 1984 drama about real estate salesmen and fraudsters. But death can take many forms. The salesmen are dead inside, none more so than the one we care about the most, Shelley Levene, portrayed as a man pushed over the edge of desperation by Tony nominee Bob Odenkirk, of 'Better Call Saul.'
Death has always had a place in the dramatic literature and on the stage. It's there in the title of one of the greatest of all American plays: 'Death of a Salesman.' Dead bodies serve as ingredients for meat pies in Stephen Sondheim's masterwork, 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.' After young Eurydice descends to the Underworld in 'Hadestown,' a musical by Vermont native Anaïs Mitchell, her lover Orpheus heads down after her in hopes of rescuing her. Winner of eight Tony Awards in 2019, 'Hadestown' is still going strong after nearly 2,000 performances.
For further evidence of Broadway's ongoing fascination with death, look no further than Tuesday's announcement that 'Beetlejuice the Musical' will be revived for a second time this fall, just six years after it premiered.
In its deranged way, 'Beetlejuice' explores the line between life and death.
Near the start of the show, the mischief-making ghost of the title jovially serenades the audience with 'The Whole Being Dead Thing': 'Welcome to a show about death/ You're gonna be fine/ On the other side/ Die!/ You're all gonna die!/ I'll be your guide/ To the other side/ Though in full disclosure/ It's a show about death.'
Um, Mr. Beetlejuice, sir? Make that
another
show about death.
Don Aucoin can be reached at
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