Musical theatre is alive — and dead — on Broadway this season
Death Becomes Her, Operation Mincemeat, and Dead Outlaw have a striking commonality: All involve corpses, and they're some of the season's biggest scene-stealers.
There's a peculiar trend among the body of work on Broadway stages this season, one that validates anyone who claims theatre is dead. Well, sort of.
Sure, death is an omnipresent theme in art of all kinds. But for a medium called “live theatre,” corpses — albeit ones with second lives of sorts — are surprisingly abundant, and they're emerging as this season’s biggest scene-stealers. More unexpected still, they’re in musical comedies, like the flashy and fabulous Death Becomes Her, about two women who take a potion that keeps them forever young and alive even though it stops their heartbeats.
Also revealing its grave theme in the title is Dead Outlaw, a surprise 2024 hit from off Broadway about a criminal who gets famous from decades as a traveling sideshow attraction — all posthumously. Somewhat less obvious from its moniker is the acclaimed British import Operation Mincemeat, named for a real World War II mission in which Allied soldiers dressed up a corpse to divert their German foes.
What is it about the deceased that makes musical theatre come alive? "Comedy and tragedy live very close to each other, and both have a music about them," proposed Mincemeat star and co-creator Natasha Hodgson. "You need the highs to get to the lows, and you need the lows to get to the highs."
Dead Outlaw book writer Itamar Moses offered another perspective: "When people stop to sing about their feelings, there's something earnest and sentimental about that," he said. "If you have some real darkness hugging against the sentimentality, it creates a balance that actually makes some of the most effective musicals."
New York Theatre Guide dug deeper with the casts and creatives of Death Becomes Her, Operation Mincemeat, and Dead Outlaw about how they made dead bodies drop-dead entertaining.
Death Becomes Her makes the hair-raising hilarious
Death Becomes Her is a corpse musical on a technicality. Frenemies Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty) and Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard), aging past their societally designated prime, take an elixir that keeps them young and alive forever. That confuses a doctor who discovers post-potion Madeline has no heartbeat or pulse, so she (along with Helen) is a walking corpse as far as he's concerned.
That situation first earned laughs in the 1992 Death Becomes Her movie starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn. The film was an early pioneer of computer-generated special effects, employed to simultaneously grotesque and comic effect. Madeline's head literally spins. Helen gets a hole through the stomach. Someone gets pushed down the stairs. None of this is fatal.
"The 'death' was appealing in the movie because it was so over the top," said Marco Pennette, the musical's book writer. "When the characters just can't speak anymore and have to sing, that's a musical. I thought, 'Well, when they're doing this kind of crap, that's when they'd have to sing.'"
Slapstick-style stage magic fills in where CGI delivered on screen, as do the zingy songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. Pennette originally wrote his Death Becomes Her script as a straight play, but he found some moments "awkward" in that format.
"Musical comedy makes you laugh at death," he said. "Pushing someone down a staircase, that's not going to be funny without music and lyrics. And now it's one of the biggest moments in the show because of the orchestra."
Eventually, Madeline and Helen have to accept their fate as perpetual living corpses despite reaching a point where they'd welcome the end. "Helen [...] goes, 'I'm just going to walk the earth until I get sucked into a black hole and then live in the vapors for eternity,'" Pennette said.
"When I wrote that, I thought, 'God, this is depressing,' but that is what they're facing, and that's the whole show. You still have your best friend to go through it with, and maybe that will make it bearable. Probably not, but maybe."
Even that moment earns grim laughs. Despite setting out to write a broad comedy, Pennette admitted to astonishment by the audience's willingness to laugh at violence and despair — and then he realized why.
"It's [like] the old joke with the banana peel," Pennette explained. "Why do people laugh? Because it's not them."
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Operation Mincemeat joins a long history of dark comedy
Like Death Becomes Her, Operation Mincemeat is as "glitzy," to use director Robert Hastie's word, as it is morbid. With the pep of musicals like Six and Hamilton, it dramatizes the efforts of World War II-era British intelligence officers desperate to get the Germans out of Sicily so the Allies can invade. From underestimated genius Charles Cholmondeley comes the idea to obtain a corpse, disguise him as an Allied pilot — complete with documents outlining a false invasion of Sardinia — and plant him on the Spanish coast for the Germans to find.
Zoe Roberts, one of Mincemeat's actors and co-creators, noted that "there's always been a history of weird darkness merging with the musical stuff," citing The Rocky Horror Show as an example. "People love anything that's a bit gory." Hodgson agreed, speaking from experience: "We grew up watching a lot of classic British dark comedies, so the macabre has always appealed to us."
That appeal extends into adulthood for actor Jak Malone and, he posited, for the public. "Gallows humor, throughout the pandemic, got me through," he said. "We were laughing and laughing because that's what you've got to do, you've got to make the best of it. And that's a lot of what our show is about, is making the best of a dreadful, dreadful situation."
Indeed, the officers almost undermine their own plan more than once with bickering and miscommunication, so Operation Mincemeat emerges chiefly as a comedy of errors despite the involvement of a dead body. "I don't think this is a macabre story," said Hastie. "It goes to some very serious places and asks some really fundamental questions about what's important to us, what we value, who we care for — but it's a runaway comedy."
The five cast members play over 75 total characters, but notably, the corpse isn't one of them. It lives entirely in the audience's imagination. The real Operation Mincemeat employed the body of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man from Wales, and the musical's characters repeatedly debate the ethics of using his corpse without bothering to learn his name. Eschewing him on stage is the show's way of both piquing audience interest and letting Michael and his invented identity, William "Bill" Martin, finally rest.
"We hope that, by the end of it, you feel like you've seen the corpse," Hastie said. "We certainly hope you feel like you care about who the corpse was."
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Dead Outlaw spotlights the grisly side of showbiz
Dead Outlaw is the least overtly comic of the bunch, instead positioning itself as a gasp-worthy campfire story: A young Wild West outlaw gets shot down only for various impresarios to shuttle his corpse around the carnival circuit for paying audiences. Filmmakers, amusement park owners, and more follow suit for 66 years.
Unlike in Mincemeat, the corpse is front and center. Andrew Durand plays Elmer McCurdy, the titular outlaw who is only alive for the show's first half. Once Elmer dies, Durand has the unique challenge of staying stock-still for 45 minutes.
This staging choice emphasizes, without being hamfisted about it, the dubious ethics of McCurdy's postmortem career. "The idea of someone who ends up being more valuable or profitable as a corpse, I thought, was a great metaphor for what happens at the outer limits of unfettered capitalism," said book writer Itamar Moses, who created Dead Outlaw with songwriters David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna. "If money can be made off you, it literally doesn't matter if you're alive or not."
Charting Elmer's life in the first half allows audiences to invest in him as a human being, Moses added, "and then we very much didn't want to have him be absent or replace him entirely with a prop or a closed casket." To see a living actor be rendered entirely without control heightens viewers' senses of both sympathy and unease.
"Traditionally, the way dramatic storytelling works is you're watching someone make choices," Moses said. "To make the second half of the show work, it's about the choices other people make for him, or the pathos of his inability to make choices, hoping somebody along the way will make a choice that will allow him to rest."
And, of course, Durand is pulling off a deceptively tricky feat by playing dead. "People find themselves quite riveted," vouched actor Jeb Brown, who plays Dead Outlaw's Band Leader and narrator. He compared the audience's fascination with Durand-as-Elmer to that of visitors at a King Tut exhibit: "There's something absolutely thrilling about being [...] nose to nose with someone in death who you never could have gotten anywhere near in life."
That same thrill is, of course, what brought gawkers to see the real Elmer 100 years ago. (He died in 1911 and was buried in '77.) A song in the show called "Something About a Mummy" speaks to that timeless pull, which, Brown suggested, has to do with our “coming to terms with the fact that this whole business of being alive is a fatal condition.”
"It's not something we love to look at in our culture," he continued. But our show has a way of spinning that reality in such a way that you walk out thinking, [...] 'Let's make the most of it while we're here.'"
Get Dead Outlaw tickets now.
Photo credit: Death Becomes Her, Operation Mincemeat, and Dead Outlaw. (DBH photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman; Mincemeat photos by Julieta Cervantes; Dead Outlaw photos by Matthew Murphy)
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