If I said you were going to have a great time at a show (a musical!) called We’re Gonna Die, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a show by its name—especially one by Young Jean Lee.
As soon as you walk into Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater and hear the preshow music—the upbeat themed tunes include Ke$ha’s “Die Young,” Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U,” and Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms”—one thing is crystalline-clear: We’re Gonna Die will not be a downer. (Also: Does anybody do preshow music better than Lee? Before the start of Straight White Men, which marked her Broadway premiere in 2018, audiences heard an all-female hip-hop playlist.) Never mind that the show is set in a hospital waiting room…or is it purgatory?
Janelle McDermoth takes on the role Lee originated in 2011, relating various tales of death—of innocence, of friendship, of a relationship, of a father. (“All of the stories in this show are true, but not all of them happened to me,” writes Lee in a note accompanying the script.) McDermoth is an open, bright-eyed performer with whom we connect instantly, and she has a big, beautiful voice, powerful and pure—none of those gratuitous American Idol–style riffs for her.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
At first, the stories she tells are kid stuff: realizing that her Uncle Bryan—“he smells bad, he’s rude, and whenever he comes to visit, he just kind of sits there and lets everyone wait on him”— has “a public face that he put on to cover up the true extent of his suffering”; learning to ride a bicycle from her 6-year-old friends Amber and Danielle, and later being shunned by those previously benevolent pals on the school playground. She then moves on to romance: “When I was in college, I dated a series of alcoholics, none of whom were my boyfriend, which I knew because they would all tell me, ‘You’re not my girlfriend.’” The time she found her first white hair: “I had reached the point in my life where everything from here on out was going to be a downward decline towards deterioration and sickness and death.” The process of her healthy nonsmoker father die an excruciating death from lung cancer, struggling for each breath he took.
Essentially, each story is accompanied by a song; Lee wrote the lyrics and cowrote the music with Tim Simmonds. My personal favorite is the infectious ’80s bubblegum pop–infused “I Still Have You” (music by John-Michael Lyles): “I still have you/ You’re in my bed/ You’ll hold my hand/ Until I’m dead.” And the straight-talking missive “Horrible Things”—“Who do you think you are?/ To be immune from tragedy?/ What makes you so special?/ That you should go unscathed?”—packs a major wallop. The awesome on-stage band, by the way, is keyboardist/percussionist Ximone Rose, bassist Debbie Christine Tjong, bandleader/guitarist/keyboardist Kevin Ramessar, guitarist Freddy Hall, and drummer/percussionist Marques Walls.
The stories are so absorbing and McDermoth’s interpretations are so engaging that it’s actually a shame We’re Gonna Die runs only 65 minutes. (But dropping balloons in an upstage corner all throughout the show, one by one by one by one? Majorly distracting. It’s like a leaky faucet.) We want to hear more. How often can you say you want a show to be longer?
We’re Gonna Die opened Feb. 25, 2020, and runs through March 22 at the Tony Kiser Theater. Tickets and information: 2st.com
