Rachel Bloom’s Off-Broadway Musical Laughs in the Face of Death—In a Nice Way

Behold, the genesis of Death, Let Me Do My Show. She toured it as a special, working out the kinks, before upgrading her sets, band, costumes—all of it—for the off-Broadway show.

During tech rehearsals in New York, she spends over an hour patiently delivering the same handful of lines so different options can be tweaked for lighting, blocking, sound, all of it. Barefoot in sequined pants and a black top, she does a series of calisthenics and warrior poses familiar to any mom who’s not sure when her back started to feel like that, firing off requests and suggestions and jokes all the while. She’s settling into an Airbnb for the run, and could they add two big containers of white vinegar to the list, one for home and one for the theater? She forgot her Clarisonic toothbrush and doesn’t want her husband (she affectionately refers to him by his last name, Gregor) to have to worry about finding it and bringing it when he joins her with their daughter. She’s still pissed about something a high school drama teacher said about her audition for Little Shop of Horrors, when teen Rachel was having a tough time. The running commentary bounces from personal admin to the show to commentary on society to her desire for a doughnut from the snack table set up stage left, which she shares by declaring, “I have to doughnut.”

It’s a lot happening all at the same time, a whole galaxy of planets spinning around Bloom, the sun: balancing the show and her family, trying to do everything she can to support her friends and colleagues, making sure there’s a trash can in the dressing room. She does it all standing in front of the show’s backdrop, which shouts, “Rachel Bloom” in oversized neon, as if there’s any forgetting who’s at the center of all of this. But after the whirlwind of Crazy Ex, she’s used to being a human command center. This, though, is a new level.

“The thing that baffles me is I had a TV show where I was in the writers room writing songs, performing, and editing. I was working 16-hour days,” she said. “It was so incredibly hard. Having a kid is way harder. Because you are not trained your whole life [for parenting]. We spend our whole lives working on a career, right? So at least there’s some sort of training or kind of context for when the schedule is really hard. With a kid, there’s no training, but you have to suddenly become an expert and I find it harder. I find it astonishing that this is what’s expected of most people: that you are expected to have kids and most people are like, yeah, that’s just what you do.”

Bloom is so open that it’s easy to believe that she’s working things through in real time. When she sings a lullaby that ends with her sweetly crooning “this is hell” while gazing at an imaginary baby in an imaginary crib, you might feel guilty for laughing. This woman seems like an open wound, but she isn’t. She’s a very good actor who has done a lot of work in therapy and is also a gifted writer who is able to convey, for example, that gut punch of feeling sleep-deprived and terrified and totally smitten all at the same time, a common and potent cocktail of early parenthood. When she talks about Schlesinger in the show, it feels so raw that I almost want to stop her—wait, before you show us too much of yourself! But she’s okay. She wasn’t always, but she is now.

“Anything I say onstage has been processed. I think I have a good sense of not only what trauma has been processed but also what can I stand behind, should someone be like, ‘I have an issue with the story,’” she said. “Basically anything I share, it’s not the first time I’m sharing it with someone. Could I have done this show in 2020? No. I couldn’t look at a picture of Adam for the first couple of months without crying. I couldn’t physically deal with it. I did my first stand-up show [of this material] back in May 2021, and by then it was processed. It had become part of my personal narrative. There are things that happen to you and you’re in shock, and for a while you’re like, ‘That’s not me. That’s not my story.’ And then when it all folded into my story, it finally became real that I was a parent. I felt for the first couple months like, ‘When are these people going to come get their baby?’ You just feel like you’re cosplaying a parent, you’re like, ‘I feel like an imposter. This is insane.’ Every time I said ‘my daughter’ it felt like I was doing an impression of someone. ‘Oh, my daughter.’”

And that same daughter has led her to strengthen her own boundaries around what she shares. While she can ask her husband for consent to share stories about their first bout with postpartum sex, for example, a toddler doesn’t understand how to give permission for her mom to tell funny stories about her. That toddler will also some day probably learn how to read and operate a computer, and will be able to google herself and her mother. Bloom has a new sense of protecting her daughter now and in the future, an added consideration in her material.