She decided to blow up what she’d written and start over. Her revamped solo musical, “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” toured London, Chicago, and Boston, among other cities, before landing off Broadway last year. In New York, it was praised by critics and enjoyed two extended runs. Now, she’s bringing “Death, Let Me Do My Show” to the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s MainStage in the Berkshires, July 5-14, where it will be filmed for a television special. She will then take the show back on the road, including to Boston’s Wilbur Theatre on August 10.
“Thematically, it’s about how death gets in the way of all of our most structured plans,” says Bloom, whose father grew up in Somerville. “It’s a show ultimately working through the shock of what happened. And it asks the question: How do you acknowledge death but continue to live? And that extends to what is the role of silliness? What is the role of stupid jokes when we’re all going to die?”
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Still, there’s plenty of space for bawdy, absurd, and sardonic humor amid the bleakness and pain, courtesy of Bloom’s signature co*cktail of mordant musical satire, acerbic observation, and raunchy transgression. After all, this is a performer and writer who wrote songs for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” like the roof-raising disco anthem, “Let’s Generalize About Men,” that parodies women’s irritation and anger with the opposite sex. (“Let’s not distinguish between them at all, let’s just drink a lot more alcohol.”) Or in the uproariously vulgar “Sex With a Stranger,” in which Bloom’s character Rebecca, clad in a slinky catsuit, croons about a one-night stand, “Hey, sexy stranger, come back to my place ... and please don’t be a murderer.”
Her award-winning 2015-19 series centered on a mentally unstable woman, Rebecca Bunch, whose self-doubt, fear, and anxiety come alive through elaborate musical numbers. The show was praised for its depiction of someone living with undiagnosed mental illness. In “Antidepressants Are So Not a Big Deal,” Rebecca’s therapist and dancing chorus try to alleviate her hesitancy about pharmaceuticals.
This candor is a hallmark of Bloom’s comedy. “My own sense of humor isn’t very precious,” says Bloom, who spent time in Boston last year filming the second season of “Julia,” in which she played a television director who butted heads with Julia Child. “A lot of people ask, what’s OK to joke about in comedy? What isn’t OK to joke about? For me it’s just about, are you presenting an interesting or new idea? That’s how I create. I look at [it] as an episode of ‘Shark Tank’ where you’re trying to fill a need or a void. What’s something I know to be true about the world that hasn’t been said, and how can I contribute to that?”
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One song that remains from the original version of “Death, Let Me Do My Show” is Bloom’s lively ode to the yearly blossoming of the Bradford pear tree, which emits a pungent odor. A smiling Bloom sings the perky melody while twirling a parasol, mixing starry-eyed romance with bawdy lyrics about bodily fluids.
As a musical theater-loving kid, Bloom says she was raised on older songs from the canon that tend to dance around a subject, only suggesting what’s bubbling under the surface. So as she grew up, she countered that with a penchant for brutal, sometimes raunchy honesty in her songwriting. “So much of musical theater is coy,” she says. “I just got tired of innuendo and cuteness, and I wanted things to just be the thing.”
In the show’s tender ballad “Lullaby for a Newborn,” she cradles a water bottle wrapped in a towel and sings the refrain, “I love you so much I could cry ... Now hush go to sleep, And please don’t die,” giving voice to the helplessness and fear she was grappling with as a new mother. “I wanted to show the contrast of the sweetness and wonder of having a newborn, but also the terror that their swaddle is going to strangle them and all of the ways they can die,” Bloom says. “I’d never seen those two things smushed together in a very unprecious, unflinching way.”
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For Bloom, writing helps her to process her own thoughts and feelings about whatever she’s going through. “I try to be as honest as possible on stage and in my writing without offending people in my life, because to me it is cathartic. I work out my thoughts by speaking out loud and externalizing them. So this show was totally me working through things.”
After so much collective grief and loss, Bloom knows that most people don’t want to think about the pandemic anymore. But she believes we need to “acknowledge that the world went through this mass trauma, even if you didn’t lose someone personally,” she asserts. “The solution is not to move on and forget completely, but you also can’t live your life mired in the constant fear of dying.”
That contradiction lies at the heart of the show. “How do you balance the cognitive dissonance of that?” says Bloom. “That’s the main thing the show asks, because that’s the thing I was struggling with. How do you acknowledge death but continue to live?”
“Death, Let Me Do My Show”
Created and performed by Rachel Bloom, presented by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, July 5-14. At: Williamstown Theatre Festival, MainStage, ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Williamstown, Mass. Tickets: from $35; 413-458-3200; www.wtfetstival.org
