In a glitzy silver pantsuit, Rachel Bloom enters on stage and at once introduces us to her dog, who is sitting in the lap of a handler (or is it Bloom’s husband?) in the front row of the Orpheum Theater, home for 29 years for “Stomp,” which closed at the start of 2023, one of the many indirect casualties of  the pandemic.  

Bloom tells us the show we’re about to see, “a big new musical standup,” is what she was planning to present after her TV series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” ended in 2019. The pandemic made that impossible…until now.

Except the show that follows, which is an encore production from a brief run at the Lortel in September, is not the one Bloom initially promises. She changes course with a theatrical device that I’ve been asked to preface with a spoiler alert (and will tell you about in the next paragraph.) The title should clue us into this change: “Death, Let Me Do My Show” is a show about death, Bloom’s personal experience and personal take on it. But in many ways, the show is also still the glitzy musical standup she initially intended: She riffs a lot about her dog,  makes offbeat comic observations,  sings a half dozen funny original songs, some of them parodies, most of them with gleefully vulgar lyrics. The result  is certainly clever, undeniably entertaining at times, but also largely hollow. By framing her experiences through a synthetic comic filter, she keeps us at a distance from much of anything meaningful or memorable about this greatest mystery of human existence, or the reactions it inspires – which is to say, fear, grief, cosmic questioning.  It’s as if she felt forced to deal with a subject she’d rather ignore.

And, indeed, she is forced to deal with it, by a heckler. The heckler (here’s the spoiler alert) is Death himself (portrayed by David Hull, who portrayed White Josh in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.) Bloom is self-aware enough to realize that, even when she talks about her actual experiences, she doesn’t want to go deep or raw, and smart enough to make her avoidance part of the show. 

More than halfway through, forced by Death, Bloom finally details what traumatized her. Her daughter was born, with complications that put her into the intensive care unit, in March, 2020, at the outbreak of COVID-19 – and was on a ventilator at the same time that she discovered that her songwriting partner, Adam Schlesinger, was on one too. He would soon die of Covid. Bloom’s psychiatrist, she tells us,  counseled her to “feel the grief” – and then he too died, from cardiac arrest, at the age of 44. Two other friends died of cancer. “Over the course of 2020, I kept trying to feel normal, to forget the pain…”

She consulted a psychic. She decorated her daughter’s nursery with drawings of her dog; during her pregnancy she had become obsessed with her dog’s mortality: “I realized that having a dog is inherently tragic because you love someone who, will not only die before you, but you HOPE will die before you.”

She engages in direct, and resentful, dialogue with Death. “Now that you’ve made me talk about death, it’s all I can talk about! Either I pretend it’s the before and everything’s okay and I’m able to do silly jokes and silly songs or I remember death exists and is coming for me and everyone I love and I can’t think about anything else. And that’s been my life for the past three years.”

Bloom’s instinct, her brand, is not to leave her audience in such existential gloom. The show ends with Death  becoming something of a life coach, helping her to “acknowledge death but continue to live” and they end in a duet, in which Death advises her to think of herself as her daughter’s dog, somebody who hopes to die before she does. 

Dogs don’t know they’re tragic.
Dogs don’t know they’re sad.
Dogs are just grateful 
For all the time they’ve had. 

The title of the song is “My Daughter’s Dog.” Like much in the show, it’s not actually comforting, but it’s funny.

Death, Let Me Do My Show
Orpheum Theater through January 6
Tickets: $60 – $170
Running time: 80 minutes
Written and performed by Rachel Bloom
Directed by Seth Barrish
Set design by Beowulf Boritt, costume design by Kristin Isola, lighting design by Aaron Copp, sound design by Beth Lake and Alex Neumann, projection design by Hana S. Kim
Music direction and orchestration by Jerome Kurtenbach