Summary
Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special is a dynamic one-woman stage show and a new kind of considered post-pandemic entertainment.
There’s nothing stand-up comedy connoisseurs like less than experimental specials that challenge the idea of what stand-up comedy can be, so I fear the discourse that might emerge around Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special. This is a shame since it’s a remarkable work of art that toys with the medium to a genuinely profound effect.
I’m reminded, immediately, of Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees, which is also on Netflix and is very different but identical in one underlying quality – it uses the mechanics of stand-up comedy as the jumping-off point for something else. I don’t know how I’d describe that “something else” in the context of Bloom’s special, which combines jokes with musical theatre, dramatic acting, narrative, and physical props. But I know it’s something.
The theme is death. That should be obvious from the title, but Bloom doesn’t grapple with the idea in the way you’d think. It’s personified in the form of a heckler in the crowd who pushes Bloom to explore the avenues of her life that have had their lights dimmed by loss; the birth of her child during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety about the pending loss of her dog, and the death in 2020 of her friend and writing partner, Adam Schlesinger.
Schlesinger died from COVID, one of its earliest recognizable victims, but while the pandemic unavoidably factors heavily into Death, Let Me Do My Special, it isn’t a downbeat, accusatory lament about what happened during that time. Instead, it’s a post-pandemic accounting of where we are culturally after being, so suddenly and for so long, closely acquainted with our mortality. Bloom tries to avoid the subject but eventually, like all of us, she’s forced to grapple with its implications.
Filmed at the Williamstown Theater Festival at Williams College in Massachusetts, where Schlesinger co-founded Fountains of Wayne, Death, Let Me Do My Special finds Bloom examining death through jokes, dialogue, and song. All of it is funny, some of it is silly, and a lot of it is moving. But anything that might feel like artifice is reinforced by Bloom’s obvious earnestness; her eyes dampen with tears when she recalls her daughter’s birth, or the loss of Adam, and her fumbling efforts to rationalize what happened to her – nay, to all of us – ring with truth.
I’m reluctant to give much away. There are several surprises in the special, all used to help underscore the central ideas, crack a window into Bloom’s headspace, and coax us through what we feel. Some of it’s subtle – Bloom’s gradual disrobing as she becomes more vulnerable, first taking off her shoes, then her jacket, as she settles into the stage like it’s her home – and some of it… well, isn’t. But that’s fine. Comedy is rarely subtle, and musical theatre never is.
Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special shouldn’t be dismissively filed away alongside the countless other projects that have, often execrably, sought to help us rationalize the pandemic. It’s much more than that, and even if it weren’t for the specific contouring of a global health crisis, it’d be resonant for its efforts to unpack universal fears and anxieties about death, loss, parenting, and the world’s ceaseless carousel of calamity.
It is post-pandemic entertainment, of course, but the first, I’d say, of a new wave, given perspective and insight by the time that has elapsed since and the distance we now feel from it. It’s a considered look back and a hopeful look forward, as well as a reassuring acknowledgement that, in the meanwhile, we were all there, we all felt it, and we can all get through it together.
It’s also quite brilliant.
