During March 2020 and as the Pandemic lockdown was getting under way, Rachel Bloom – creator, executive director and star of CW’s beloved musical dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – ran into a series of somewhat Covid-related setbacks.
She gave birth to a daughter with underdeveloped lungs. She lost best friend singer-songwriter Adam Schlesinger to the virus. She lost other friends, one to cancer. She lost her 44-year-old psychiatrist shortly after she’d received the advice that the way to handle her grief was to feel it.
Working on a new performance piece at the time, she knew her benign intentions had just been unceremoniously knocked into a cocked hat. As a writer and performer, she realized her approach to the profound feelings she was experiencing must dictate the new work. The result: Death, Let Me Do My Show.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
And so here it is, but is it the right show? To that blunt query, Bloom’s audience, whom she addressed as Boomers, would shout a resounding yes and, at curtain, would standingly ovate. As for me, not a Boomer, I have to say no. I’d go farther than declaring merely that it’s not my cup of tea. I contend that the unapologetically aggressive Bloom – an obviously intelligent and extremely proficient presence in glittering pants suit and gold high heels – has the wherewithal to put together 85 intermissionless minutes that deal more movingly with death while remaining just as risible.
What’s the problem, as I view it? Cuteness, with the following explanation involving her format. Bloom begins with, apparently, the act she started writing before changing directions. But not too long after her personable welcoming remarks, she talks about the street where she lives and sings a song she composed, with music director Jerome Kurtenbach, called “Darling, Meet Me Under the Cum Tree.”
Uh-huh, that’s what it’s about as it details what the Bradford Pear tree smells like in the spring. I’d go so far as to suggest that anyone reading this review and getting a kick out of the very idea of something dubbed “Darling, Meet Me Under the Cum Tree” will likely consider Death, Let Me Do My Show, the very essence of top-drawer entertainment. Incidentally, Bloom, carrying a parasol throughout the number, seems to be hawking a parody here. She attributes the tune to Noel Coward offering it in 1874, definitely a lame gag.
And now for a great big spoiler alert, or at least part of one: About to segue from the Bloom-Kurtenbach olfactory item into something about a bush smelling like a bush (if you follow the sorta pornographic way Bloom thinks), she’s interrupted. That’s the part this reviewer feels is safe to alert. Maybe it’s also okay enough to reveal that actor David Hull, billed on a poster at the back of the theater but not on the distributed show card, appears as a second character, a heckler.
End of spoiler alert, more or less; Hull’s personage encourages Bloom to discuss death more fully, which she does, only intermittently stopped by the intruder so he can croon “I Feel Just Like Dear Evan Hansen,” written by Bloom with Eli Bolin and Jack Dolgen. He hefts it with such energy that he received the biggest hand of the evening on the night I was taking notes. Kudos to Bloom for seemingly offering no objections.
Otherwise, Bloom commandingly takes the stage that designer Beowulf Boritt decorates much more sparsely than he did the now closed New York, New York. With Seth Barrish directing, she talks more directly and in detail about death but not necessarily in plumbing effective depth. For instance, she chats long and hard about her cherished dog, Wiley, and his inevitable demise. Yammering with confusing logic, she arrives in time at the statement, “I am my daughter’s dog” and at “My Daughter’s Dog.” Amusing? Yes, to some. Tedious? Yes, to at least one other. This ditty she tossed off with the remarkable Shaina Taub, whose better output was the recent Suffs.
Bloom knows her audience and plays to it. If it’s gen-Boomer, it’s a generation that to a great extent considers itself cool – with it, awesome – to lard sentences with the now-acceptable-everywhere f-word. Also greatly admired is speaking openly – as if with commendable candor – about body parts and body functions as the foundation of genuine humor. Maybe it is occasionally humorous, but it’s got nothing to do with wit. Whereas Bloom gives the ready impression of having the wherewithal for being impressively witty on the challenging subject, death.
Full disclosure: I did laugh with Bloom once when she was talking about God and doctors and commented that to Jews, doctors are God. It’s not the freshest of gags, but it struck, me as funny, which is, I suppose, a clue to the mid-alphabet generation I populate.
Death, Let Me Do My Show opened September 14, 2023, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and runs through September 30. Tickets and information: lortel.org
