Are You There God? Rachel Bloom Just Wants To Talk in Death, Let Me Do My Show

For the privileged among us, death seems easy to ignore. In a culture of suffocating optimism and compulsive silver-lining, an awareness of the ever-looming presence of our mortality drives us away from the sunny-skies coping mechanisms we so often employ to get us through our days. But ignoring death will never make it go away. 

In March of 2020, Rachel Bloom gave birth to her daughter at the same time her writing partner (and Fountains of Wayne member) Adam Schlesinger passed away from covid. While her daughter was on one coast strapped to a ventilator in the NICU, Schlesinger was fighting a losing battle against the novel coronavirus; not lost on Bloom, the cosmic irony left the Emmy-award-winning musical comic grappling with the uncertainty of life. 

Over the course of a few short months, Bloom endured a number of excruciating brushes with death, including the passing of multiple others in her close circle of collaborators and support network. In addition to the anguish and fears inherent in new motherhood, Bloom was left with no other choice than to confront the grim reality of the human condition, as she so eloquently and affectingly does in her new one-woman performance, Death, Let Me Do My Show.

Prior to the pandemic, Bloom sought to put on a show that made people laugh, a production filled with silly songs and her classic punchy, up-beat cerebral stand-up routine, but the events in her personal life during the beginning stages of the pandemic forced Bloom to face her ambiguous feelings about the afterlife. Prior to 2020, she rarely thought about death, she shares in her show, but amidst the tragedy of the pandemic and its personal implications on her life, as well as the complications surrounding her daughter’s birth, grief came knocking, an all-consuming sound Bloom couldn’t ignore. I spoke with the decorated multi-hyphenate to discuss the return of her off-Broadway act, the role humor plays in accepting our impending fates, and how to acknowledge death while still continuing to live.

The trick is not to let it consume you, Bloom shares over the phone with me, and she’s found during her writing process that laughter can act as an effective anecdote to existential dread. 

“Humor almost makes you forget death for a second,” she says to me on our call. 

Perhaps it’s the surprise of it all. Much like death, the formula for a joke that works relies on its ability to catch the audience off-guard. “Humor and surprise are interconnected,” says Bloom, in that you “don’t see the joke coming.” 

As a novice to the crippling magnitude of grief, Bloom definitely didn’t see her world turning on its head as it did during the pandemic.

Although her new show (playing for its second run in New York City at the Orpheum Theatre from December 7th through January 6th) certainly has humor in spades, it won’t let audiences ignore death, nor will it provide any exact answer to the existence of an afterlife. If Bloom has to sit with the excruciating discomfort of not knowing, we do too.

When I asked Bloom how she addresses these difficult themes with her young child, like any good parent, she admits to protecting her daughter from what she “doesn’t need to know.” 

Voicing a similar sentiment about her return to the waking world following her intimate encounters with the dark side, she shares with me that, “how much you take in” about the unfortunate facts of life impacts your ability to move forward.

Much of Bloom’s daughter’s birth story involves heartbreak, a story her child, now three, may not need to know, but Bloom grapples with on stage. The terror of having her newborn ripped from her hands mere moments after the baby was placed there led Bloom to take a gamble on the benevolence of some possible higher power, turning to prayer to bargain with God for the safe passage of her daughter and dear friend battling covid across the country. If He holds up His end, she reasoned, she might consider becoming agnostic.

Although Bloom’s prayers for her writing partner, Schlesinger, went unanswered, she still considered that the universe may have more in store than she originally gave it credit for, an unexpected departure from her once-confident atheism. 

Despite these cosmic quandaries, Bloom manages, some several years out, to find humor in this gut-wrenching experience. “Silliness can be profound,” and “humor gives you a perspective you never thought of,” says the comic as a welcome relief to the insurmountable, unanswerable question of our own insignificance.

Everyone has their own perspective on and relationship with death, mortality, God, and the afterlife. Maybe that’s why Bloom chose to write a one-woman show to address these complicated topics. Exceedingly popular in recent years, “solo shows allow you to communicate a very specific tone on your own terms,” explains the actor. And the tone of Death, Let Me Do My Show, much to Bloom’s credit, is one of humility, in that in never claims to have all the answers, but seeks to put forth a camaraderie by showcasing the same kind of vulnerability for which her fans of the hit series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend have come to love her. 

When I ask her about the different affect musical comedy conveys in comparison with regular stand-up, she speaks to her insecurities of being too earnest. Coming of comedy-age in a rigid, almost mathematical school of writing, music lets her express herself in a way that isn’t too cheesy. 

“Music is this really straight line to emotion,” the comic shares, with just enough earnestness, I might add. In her monologues, as well as her musical numbers, she expertly rides the fine line between “honesty and [self-indulgence],” a skillful accomplishment in a show with such lofty goals as her own.

“I tried to really write a show that Adam would like,” Bloom says of her late writing partner, Schlesinger, who had a genius way with words and song.

He was “emotional, but never sentimental,” she adds about her friend and creative companion.

Death, Let Me Do My Show sings a similar tune, a true homage to their life’s work together.

Come and contemplate the potential of a cold, unfeeling void, whilst paying tribute to a dearly departed and widely beloved Hollywood veteran, with the highly intelligent, ever-heartfelt, and much-anticipated off-Broadway return of Rachel Bloom’s Death, Let Me Do My Show.

Tickets are on sale now for this one-woman musical comedy.