Death, Let Me Do My Special
Netflix · 2024 · 77 min
A musical comedy special where Death interrupts the opening act.
Rachel Bloom wants to perform a silly, escapist musical comedy set about a neighborhood tree that smells like semen, but a literal personification of Death keeps calling her out from the audience. What starts as a desperate attempt to ignore the pandemic and pretend it is still 2019 quickly pivots into a scripted confrontation with the grief she spent years running from.
Filmed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, a location chosen because it was a creative home of her late writing partner Adam Schlesinger, the 2024 Netflix special marks Bloom’s return to the spotlight after the end of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Directed by Seth Barrish, the show mimics a traditional stand-up taping before transitioning into a theatrical dialogue. Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-star David Hull appears as Death, a polite but persistent heckler who forces her to rewrite the evening’s material on the fly.
The hour oscillates between musical-theater numbers and narrative storytelling. Bloom details the terrifying, isolated experience of her daughter’s birth and immediate NICU stay during the initial 2020 lockdowns, alongside a song mourning the inevitable death of her dog and a sequence mocking the manipulative emotional cues of Broadway musicals. The emotional core of the performance is her attempt to process Schlesinger’s death from COVID-19 complications. Critics praised the production’s willingness to sit with grief rather than just joke around it, noting that it successfully balances theatrical structure with the casual energy of a live gig.
The set list
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An ode to the odorous Bradford pear tree.
Bloom performs a 1920s-style pastoral romantic ditty about a tree widely notorious for smelling like semen ('cum tree').
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Death personified interrupts the performance from the audience.
A heckler revealed to be Death (played by David Hull) breaks Bloom's attempt at doing light comedy, challenging her avoidance of grief and eventually performing a Dear Evan Hansen parody song.
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Calculating dog mortality and the Rainbow Bridge.
Bloom explores the neurotic math behind expecting her elderly dog to die, pet insurance blunders, and a zany song about the mythical pet heaven that turns unexpectedly poignant.
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A musical number about ghosts.
Bloom portrays a bloody bride to argue that ghosts and hauntings, while scary, are far preferable to the terrifying void of absolute oblivion.
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The conflation of new life and sudden death in March 2020.
Bloom recounts the harrowing parallel timeline of giving birth to her daughter with fluid in her lungs while receiving news that collaborator Adam Schlesinger was dying of COVID on a ventilator across the country.
How it plays
- Tone
- Cathartic, profane, poignant, whimsical, and emotionally sincere.
- On stage
- Whimsical, raunchy, highly theatrical, and candidly vulnerable, combining Broadway musical chops with self-aware and profane humor.
- Pace
- Begins with high-energy abandon bounding onto the stage to 'Space Jam', then navigates abrupt tonal pivots from silly, upbeat musical ditties to somber, deeply emotional confessions.
- About
- death and mortality, grief and loss, the COVID-19 pandemic, motherhood and childbirth, pet mortality, existential dread and the afterlife
What the critics said
Acclaimed by critics as brilliant, essential, and profound; praised for balancing bawdy musical humor with genuine emotional catharsis and reframing the boundaries of standup comedy.
In the room: Immersed and deeply engaged, moving between laughing at bawdy musical humor and absorbing uncomfortable, heartfelt reflections on shared collective trauma.
Backstory
Conceived following the March 2020 COVID-19 shutdown, during which Bloom gave birth to her first child (who experienced NICU complications) at the exact time her close friend and songwriting partner Adam Schlesinger was hospitalized and died of COVID-19.
Details
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