This Show Was NOT Becoming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                          It has taken me a week to process seeing "Death Becomes Her," the musical adaptation of the 1992 film at the Lunt-Fontanne theater.  But then, I ask myself, what the hell was there to process????????????

                                            I never saw the film, but the adaptation seems pretty straightforward.  Megan Hilty, Jennifer Simard, and the always reliable Christopher Sieber step in for Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis, with Michelle Williams substituting for Isabella Rosellini.  As if she could.

                                                As if any of them could, darlings.  The sets by Derek McLane and the costumes by Paul Tazwell are eye catching, but it takes more than visual eye candy to make a show, and this one fails miserably.

                                                When the hell, girls, did Megan Hilty get so chunky?  No matter what gorgeous gown she is wrapped in, I could not take my eyes off those wide hips.  The usually hot and hunky Mr. Sieber is dressed throughout like a eunuch, and his role, down to the songs he sings are emasculated as well.  This man was in "Company," the Sondheim masterpiece.  Was this all there was for him out there?

                                                     But it is not his fault, entirely.  The book by Marco Pennette, with Music and Lyrics by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey make no difference, and besides, one cannot hear them.  You've heard me discourse on belting on the Broadway stage.  Well, that is all the Misses Hilty and Simard do throughout; the problem is, the louder they get, the less one can hear and understand what is being sung.  So, why add music at all?  Not only is this disappointing, but it was also frustrating.

                                                           Still, I learned something from "Death Becomes Her," which is bad theater.  Not everything needs to be turned into a musical, and all the visual trappings cannot save a show devoid of a competent book and served with an even more incompetent score that, for the most part, is sung incompetently.

                                                              I hated it.  But the way things are going, who am I to say?

                                                              The way things are going, this could turn out to be the season's TONY winner.

                                                               In which case, the Culture Ship has sunk, darlings!!!!!!!!!!!!!