“Broadway becomes her” is something it’s easy to say about Megan Hilty. When the average theatergoer heads to see her in “Death Becomes Her,” they may feel, with good reason, that they’re buying a ticket to catch one of the quintessential modern Broadway divas in an essential star turn. Everything about that is accurate except for the idea that seeing Hilty in a grand part in one of New York’s grand theaters has really been a regular opportunity. Not quite as much as you think, which makes her comedic turn in “Death” even more something to relish.
Hilty’s Broadway credits include a breakout part as a celebrated Glinda substitute in “Wicked,” followed by taking the Dolly Parton role in “9 to 5: The Musical” and a Tony-nominated part in a too-short-lived revival of “Noises Off.” But then, for the last nine years, she’s been absent from those boards. If you think of her as more of a part of the Broadway firmament than she’s been, it may be due to her two-season run on NBC’s “Smash,” where the world got very accustomed to associating her with Broadway. “Death Becomes Her” finally has again fulfilling that fictional/real destiny, currently collecting more than $1 million from 10,000-plus patrons every week, six months into its run at the Lunt-Fontanne.
Based on the 1992 horror-comedy movie, the show has her matched with an equally, gleefully wicked counterpart, Jennifer Simard (in the Goldie Hawn role, to Hilton’s Meryl Streep), supported by Michelle Williams (taking Isabella Rossellini’s part as the mystical keeper of potions) and Christopher Sieber (in the cuckolded Bruce Willis role). Any of these performances is its own reason to see “Death Becomes Her,” along with the light-footed direction and choreography of Christopher Gattelli, book by Marco Pennette and hysterical songs from Julia Mattison and Noel Carey. But, of course, seeing one of our best musical comediennes so deliciously live out the maxim that all is vanity is especially a treat for Hilton heads who’ve longed to see her in a Broadway production that lives up to the title of her former TV series.
People think of you as one of those leading ladies they relish seeing on a theater marquee, but you really haven’t done a zillion Broadway shows. When you moved to L.A. some years back, it might have seemed that Broadway was not as much in your sights. What was the zig that took you out west, and how big a zag was it, coming back to New York?
I moved out to L.A. just because we loved living there and I was really focused on the voiceover and TV parts of my career. [Hilton has done voice work for shows like “T.O.T.S.” and “Sofia the First,” as well as on-screen work in “The Good Wife” and the movie “Patsy and Loretta.”] We had two little kids and it just seemed right for us to be out there. And, at the time, with all the animation that I was doing, they really wanted you to be in L.A. to do it. Now, after the pandemic, you can be anywhere. But it really made sense for us to be there at the time.
And eight shows a week is one of the most difficult jobs in entertainment I can think of. I said to one of my friends earlier, “Eight shows a week is for young people and people who don’t know any better.” It is grueling and really, really tiring — but it’s also extraordinarily rewarding. So I knew at some point I would hopefully be able to go back to it, but I knew that it would take something really special to get me to uproot my whole family from our life in Los Angeles and replant us in the city, and also to dedicate the amount of time and energy to doing eight shows a week. I mean, I have the opposite schedule of my kids. So it’s been a real, huge transition for all of us. But this is the show that I would do that for.
Lore has it that many years back you cited “Death Becomes Her” as the movie you could most imagine getting a Broadway translation, or the one you’d most like to see getting one. Is that right?
Isn’t that crazy? I think it was eight, ten years ago, something like that. I should actually look up this interview, because I was asked that question, “If you could turn any movie into a musical, what would it be?” And I immediately said “Death Becomes Her” and rattled off a laundry list of reasons why I thought it would be an excellent musical. And the interviewer said, “Oh, they just announced that they were starting to develop that.” I was like, “See, I’m not totally crazy. I can’t wait to see it.” I don’t want to say that I manifested it.
What was your thinking, in envisioning “Death Becomes Her” as a hypothetical musical?
Really, when it comes down to it, the storyline is so sensational and the stakes are so high — abnormally high for normal life — that it makes sense that people are breaking out into song. I think one of the best indicators that something could be a musical is if it seems real that the emotions are so big that we can’t talk anymore; we have to sing about it. And I can’t think of anything bigger than two ladies trying to kill each other, yet they can’t.
Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in “Death Becomes Her”
Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
In real life, we often hear about how we shouldn’t pit women against each other — that’s giving in to the patriarchy. But for some reason, in drama or in satire, there’s something grand about pitting women against each other, especially when we know we’re not taking it seriously. Having that kind of battle in the forefront of a project is also one way of doing a female-centric production. You’ve mentioned in interviews how, on Broadway, apart from “Death Becomes Her,” there aren’t often a lot of shows with two lead women with their names above the title.
There aren’t. Yeah, they’re few and far between. And I think on the surface you could see this as two women being pitted against each other. But if you really stop and think about it, it really is a love story between these two. Stay with me here, because I know it sounds crazy, but the opposite of love is not hate — it’s indifference. And if these two were indifferent to each other, there would be no story. There’s there’s a point at the very beginning of the musical, and in the movie, too, where Madeline has a choice whether to see Helen or not… and the story could end there. If she really didn’t care about Helen, she would say, “Oh, no, I don’t need to see her.” But she has to see her because there’s something about Helen that motivates her, and it fulfills her in some way to have this back and forth with her.
There has to be some kind of adoration between the two for this story to actually work; otherwise there’s no reason for it. At least that’s in my actor eyes. Otherwise, the end doesn’t make sense either. Otherwise it’s like, “Oh, well, I guess we’re stuck with each other. We just have to deal with it.” But I believe that there’s always been something there. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in each other’s lives at all.
It seems like for the show to be satisfying, you can’t have a completely cynical ending, and maybe there have to be a few more grace notes than there were in the movie. Without it becoming sentimental — which really isn’t too great a danger in a show like this — you have to somehow dramatize frenemies finding a way to be friends.
A hundred percent. And I think that they really were successful in writing that.
You said there were three characters you drew upon as personal touchstones for doing this role, apart from drawing on the film. I remember one of them was Valerie from “The Comeback.” Can you remind me of the others?
Oh my gosh. Yeah, the three characters that I really focused on to build my Madeline are Valerie Cherish from “The Comeback”; Lucille Bluth, the matriarch of the Bluth family, from “Arrested Development”; and Miss Piggy. So my Madeline is hopefully a combination of those three, while paying homage to what Ms. Meryl Streep has so iconically laid before all of us so many years ago.
“The Comeback” was probably a lot more influential than it’s given credit for, in terms of really dealing with some of the themes around aging we see explored now in popular culture. And going back to the original film of “Death Becomes Her,” it’s almost like that was “The Substance” before “The Substance” was “The Substance.” Whether’s it’s the general questions of aging we all face — men as well as women — or the ones that are most specific to wanting to stay relevant as an actor, there are serious underpinnings that people sense, even if they’re not thinking too hard about it amid the laughter. Is there a sense in which you hope that groundedness informs the show, without the audience getting too sobered by it?
Well, it can’t be funny without hitting some nerve of truth. And when they wrote this script and these really, really smart songs, the reason why they’re landing so well is because there’s so much truth in them. And like you said, it’s not just women that are dealing with these issues. We all are trying to figure out if our value actually diminishes as we get older, like we’re constantly told. So these stories are having a moment for a reason, and I’m hoping that we’re kind of taking that narrative and kind of flipping it on its head and saying: Who says this? We do value as we age. We don’t have to accept this as a truth. So it feels very cool to be a part of a show that is addressing these issues, albeit in a humorous way.
Of course, everybody loves a good spoof of actorly vanity. Your opening number, “For the Gaze,” is an entire meta Broadway show within a Broadway show — and it’s such an extravaganza unto itself, it’s almost like everyone could leave then and be happy, and it hasn’t really gotten started yet. You clearly have a relish for the moments that are just pure silliness and send-up.
Oh, 100 percent. I’ll never forget when I got the demo for “Gaze” and I just thought, “Oh, this is it. If for nothing else, I need to do this show so that I can record this song and perform this every night. This is the greatest thing ever.” And with Christopher Gattelli’s genius ideas, it just got bigger and broader and more fun with every single thing that we added. I cannot believe I’m lucky enough to get to do that every night.
Obviously the rampant physical comedy benefits from a lot of special effects and stunts. Do you have to learn some of the elements of magic to be able to do this?
I think I’m technically considered an illusionist after this. [Laughs.] Going through this process, we tried all types of different things for a lot of these illusions, and it was really cool to get to experiment with a lot of them, especially in front of the Chicago audience (during a pre-Broadway test run last spring), because we were just kind of figuring it out. It takes doing it in front of an audience to really understand it. And what we learned there was really that the more we leaned into the campiness, the better it was received.
Like, that stair fall was one of the greatest ideas by (director/choreographer) Christopher Gattelli ever. I remember, at one point, they were toying with having a professional stunt person come and do that every night. And we quickly learned that watching someone actually fall down the stairs is horrifying, and a quite different tone than what we wanted to set with the rest of the show. So we knew we couldn’t do that. And now I think we’ve leaned so far the opposite direction that it works like gangbusters.
(L-R) Michelle Williams, Jennifer Simard, Megan Hilty, Christopher Sieber pose at the opening night of the new musical based on the film “Death Becomes Her” on Broadway at The Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on November 21, 2024 in New York City.
Bruce Glikas/Getty Images
To talk about the sheer energy the show requires… You’ve said that you sit down for exactly three and a half minutes all night, during intermission. But intermission lasts 15 minutes — you really don’t get to rest for a few more minutes than that?
No, and I have to get there a good two hours before every show so that I can roll out my muscles and stretch, and do my vocal warmups and steam. And, yeah, from the minute the show starts until we come down, I only sit down for three and a half minutes at intermission. There are two Madeline dressers, because there are so many costume changes and they’re so quick. And they always joke… I sit down and they’re like, “OK, we’ve got the timer. It’s three and a half minutes. Enjoy!” And I sit there and just… I don’t even know what I do.
But it’s great. I would have it no other way. Truly, this show is so smart and it brings people so much joy at a time where it’s so necessary, and I feel so privileged to be a part of it, that I’m ready to be exhausted for a long time… as long as they’ll have me.
You took up running, which is something you hadn’t done before, to be ready for this, right?
Yeah, because the amount of physical activity that I do on stage is a lot, so I’m literally running. As soon as I go off stage, I’m running to a quick change, and running to the next entrance … and so if you can imagine for two and a half hours, that’s a lot of movement, and I have to sing on top of it. So during the course of the development of the musical, I realized pretty quickly that I was going to have to really work on my stamina. And I thought the only way I could do that was learn how to run. And that helped immensely. I did not enjoy running before. I do now, and it proved to be very helpful in being able to do this. I can’t do it while I’m doing the show, because I have to protect my joints, but I found it really, really, really helpful in getting ready for it.
How long did you spent developing that regimen before you moved into the show?
I worked on it very slowly in little increments with a trainer for about a year before Chicago, and I asked her to train me as if I was getting ready for a race. I was training for Chicago as if it was a massive physical feat that I was training for and not a show, even though the show is a massive physical feat in itself. But it’s been great. It’s been completely life-changing, this show.
How do you feel changed by it?
Well, there’s a long list, including what we already talked about, with how our family life is completely different now that we’ve moved to the city from the suburbs of L.A. I’ve asked a lot of my two small children to adapt to a brand new school, make brand new friends and not see me as much. I mean, I was very available to them before, and now, as I mentioned before, our schedules are opposite. They’re at school during the day and I work at night, and they’re home on the weekends and I am gone during the weekends. So my Sunday night and my Monday after they get home from school are theirs completely, unless I really, really, really, really have to do something, and then I have to make it up to them. It’s just a constant juggle. So my family life has changed enormously.
Brian Gallagher and Megan Hilty attend MISCAST25 Gala at Hammerstein Ballroom on April 7, 2025 in New York City.
Getty Images
But I’ll say it again: If I was gonna do it for any show, it would be this one. I’m so deeply proud to be a part of it, and because of that, I think my children will be proud of me to be a part of it. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was the best thing for all of us.
Originating a role is not like one of the four- or six-month commitments we see some prominent actors doing as they step into things.
Oh no. Yeah, with this, I’m (in for) at least a year. So, it’s a marathon — not to do another running analogy, but it is. And I’m constantly trying to figure out how to do this in the long run to keep my body healthy, to keep my voice healthy, my mental state healthy. Because it’s a whole different thing. I really can’t do anything else on top of this show.
Everyone loves that, in the Playbill, you just stole Meryl Streep’s credits. It’s one of those things where you’re reading the “best actress of her generation” descriptor and thinking something’s a little off before you quickly realize it’s completely off. But the punchline is that you just end it abruptly on a real note with “Television credits: Smash.”
Yes, and at the end I include an Instagram account that it’s actually real. I set up an Instagram account called @ThisIsTotallyMegansRealBio, and it’s all pictures of Meryl Streep and the captions are her famous lines from whatever amazing movie the picture is from. I thought, when else am I gonna have this opportunity to do something so silly? The tone of our show just begs for silliness everywhere, I think. And I’m never again going to play another role that was made famous by the most famous actor of all time. When you read the credits for her, they’re so iconic; there’s no way they can be anybody but her. So yeah, I took a big swing doing that.
She sent you dead flowers, we understand?
Yeah, I was floored when I received those. She sent me a very, very lovely, very classy, very funny bouquet of dried flowers and a note. And it’s so fitting — they’re dried, so they’re dead, but I’ll have them forever. And then her note was perfect, and she’s just perfect.
Since you’ve moved your family back to New York, is it safe to guess that might not be just for the duration of “Death Becomes Her,” and then it’s back to L.A., but that you would be open to doing more Broadway roles after whenever this one wraps up?
One hundred percent. As long as it seems right for me and my family, yeah, I’d be totally open to it.
