Today is Friday, December 29, 2023.    Elliot and I just returned from seeing a relatively new show at the Orpheum Theater on Second Avenue and I have only words of praise for this gutsy/ comedian/writer who tackles the darkest of all subjects in her 90-minute two-character show, and that is death.  Yes, death, that shrouded figure bearing a long scythe and wearing a cowl.   As I’ve written earlier, Elliot and I had no idea what the show would consist of; we hadn’t read a review of the program before seeing the show.   In fact, I’ve never even heard of Rachel Bloom; now I know that she is the driving force behind the TV show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and for this droll but serious meditation on the long arm of death during the early days of the pandemic, the show features the participation of David Hull, who portrayed White Josh on Bloom’s television program.  Here he portrays Death with a capital D.   He’s actually sitting in the audience like any other audience member and heckles the comedian on stage when she veers from discussing the true subject of her monologue, which is her confrontation of death in the early days of the pandemic.

The show starts with Bloom taking center stage with her name in colored lettering caressing a red curtain behind her and her appearing in a dazzling gold, sparkly pantsuit.  She enters to the theme song from Space Jam and opens with a riff and sings a little ditty about a tree on her block that smells like cum.   Then she tells the audience that all she wants to do is the one-woman show she planned to tour with in 2020 that was, inevitably, cancelled because of coronavirus.  She also mentions that she and her husband were expecting a child – guess when? – in March 2020, the month that virtually everything shut down because of the mysterious virus that was felling people across the country.  Thus her daughter was born in late March.    She performs a bit about what college essays pandemic children will have to write when they’re of college age. 

Bloom valiantly tries to avoid talking about death until she is actually heckled by the personification of Death sitting in the audience who prods her to broach the subject.  As Death approaches the stage, he even performs a number where he references Evan Hansen from the recent Broadway play.   To me, Hull reminded me of a younger Mark Walhberg.    At this point, Bloom’s delivery gets serious as she recounts the time when her daughter was born and she was placed in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) because she had water on her lungs.  Bloom even sings a song about praying her daughter doesn’t die in front of her.   Then Bloom mentions the trajectory of her former songwriter collaborator Adam Schlesinger who contracted COVID-19 early on during the pandemic and later died.    Then another friend dies; another death during the pandemic is her 44-year-old psychiatrist who succumbed to a cardiac incident.  

Thus the show becomes, essentially, Bloom’s argument with death, and Death’s argument with Rachel Bloom – a death that won’t get out of her way, won’t let her just do a one-woman comedy show that lets her introduce more blue into her act than she could on network television.   The show is also packed with songs that are silly, raunchy, and even thought provoking.  

Bloom does a marvelous public service turn in the way she evokes clear memories of that terrifying early-pandemic moment (that many Americans would love to forget!), when things were careening so swiftly that every day brought a new disaster (she even shows real headlines on the wall to the audience that were written in early 2020) – the NICU where her newborn daughter was being treated was reconfigured into a COVID unit over the course of the few days the baby spent there.   

On a technical level, Bloom and her director, Seth Barrish, are more than up to the task of finding the hilarious in the bleakest of moments.  When she is able to finally bring her baby daughter home, she tells the audience how she shucked off her clothes in front of her house on her lawn to keep germs out of the house at the same time her neighbors were outside banging pots and pans to celebrate health-care workers at 7.  

During the show, there is also a long bit about her dog and being inured to a pet eventually dying.  She does a routine on the well-known Rainbow Bridge where our beloved pets go after they die.  She even sings a song about this place where we are even supposed to go when we die. 

Anyway, this is the rather untraditional show starring the very creative Rachel Bloom.    I will say her material is not for everyone since death does take center stage.  And we are nationally indisposed to thinking of death – ever. 

Stay safe and be well.

Here is the playbill from tonight’s show.  Excuse the back of the man’s head here.