On a recent trip to New York City, my sister Ginny and I caught two very different musical performances, so different, in fact, that they form the boundaries of all that musical theater can be. Blind Injustice, based on the nonfiction book by Mark Godsey detailing the work of the Ohio Innocence Project, is an opera performed on a bare stage with everyday costuming and a strong political message. Death Becomes Her, a gaudy, glitzy, multi-million-dollar Broadway musical adaptation of a cult movie, offers a token hint of reflections upon human vanity and the nature of immortality, but nobody leaves the theater grateful for the life lessons. Death Becomes Her exists for spectacle and laughs, and it provides them in abundance. On the broad spectrum stretching between these two polar opposites lie the complete works of Giacomo Puccini, Wayne Newton, Richard Wagner, Liberace, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Donny Osmond, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cher, Stephen Sondheim, Elton John, Jeanine Tesori, Kendrick Lamar, and John Corigiliano.
On our way to Lincoln Center to see Blind Injustice we walked past the huge indoor shopping mall on the west side of Columbus Circle. I had been inside the place many times to buy meals at the Whole Foods in the basement, but I had never explored any of the other fifty or so shops on the upper floors. On the sidewalk we passed a sign advertising JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER, but we knew that Lincoln Center was five blocks north. However, when we tracked down the Rose Building at Lincoln Center, we learned that our performance would be at the Rose Theater in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex inside the shopping mall. Yes, the huge 1856-seat Rose Theater occupies Floors 5 and 6 of a shopping mall, but you would never know once you set foot inside the theater. It’s like being inside a hollow egg, with perfect acoustics, clean sight lines, and a vast performing space. My niece Anna, who grew up in Cincinnati and knew of the Ohio Innocence Project, put us onto the performance of Blind Injustice—running for two nights only—and joined us for the performance. We were all floored by how good it was.
Six chairs sat equidistant on a black stage floor, each in a tight spotlight. These were the seats of the six featured victims of false convictions in our system of criminal justice. Behind these principals were rows of chairs for a chorus, and behind those rows were tiers of box seats for more choral singers. The playbill listed 33 names for the chorus, but honestly, the group looked and sounded more like fifty or sixty to me. Supertitles assured that we could understand every word of David Cote’s libretto, and the rich chorus italicized every note of Scott Davenport Richards’s score. For ninety uninterrupted minutes we heard six horror stories whose endings could be only so happy when the protagonists had spent so many years unfairly imprisoned. It was political theater at its finest and most stripped-down. We needed no sets and costume changes in order to appreciate and recoil at these stories. Stepping out of the theater and walking past Williams-Sonoma made for a jarring contrast with what we had just heard. (The next night, when Ginny and I saw Sanaz Toossi’s English on Broadway, we wished that we’d had supertitles there, too.)
Even before Death Becomes Her began, the pink and lavender lights filling the interior of the theater as room-sized curtain-warmer made clear that subtlety was not in store. Indeed, once Michelle Williams rose into sight in her spangly oversized gown, the audience broke into sustained entrance applause before she had said or sung a single note. Our fellow theater-goers had apparently arrived knowing exactly what the show delivered: camp, cattiness, outrageous behavior, and wickedly funny one-liners, of which there were seemingly hundreds. Megan Hilty plays a Broadway diva named Madeline Ashton, who stars in a show called Me Me Me, and her opening number, “For the Gaze,” runs with the pun in its title into a marathon of increasingly outrageous, over-the-top-of-the-last-over-the-top gags. In a quick costume change she’s suddenly Liza Minnelli, and then in another quick-change she’s Judy Garland as Dorothy, and then, just to put a button on it, somebody tosses her a stuffed Toto. She later appears in a leopard gown that matches perfectly the leopard couch in her apartment; need I go on? Her partner in crime, an initially mousy novelist named Helen Sharp, was played on the night we saw it by Natalie Charle Ellis, understudy to Jennifer Simard, and Ellis more than held her own at chewing the scenery with the voracious Hilty at her side. If you don’t already know the plot, which Marco Pennette cleverly adapted from the movie of the same name by David Koepp and Martin Donovan, then I’ll simply say that a magic potion grants eternal youth and beauty to anyone who swallows it, but a fatal accident will remove the youth and beauty and leave only the eternal existence part of the bargain. Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s lyrics and music serve the source material well, much in the same way that Mel Brooks’s The Producers became a better show as a musical. It’s worth the price of admission to see the moment when Helen Sharp pushes Madeline Ashton down the stairs, a fall that seems to take several minutes and inflicts a number of fatal injuries before Ashton finally splats, contorted and splayed, on the floor. And that’s not even the end of the first act.