WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS — On this warm July night in the Berkshires, Rachel Bloom is on stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival talking about the surreal experience of giving birth during the pandemic to a baby that began life in intensive care, even as her longtime songwriting partner, Adam Schlesinger, had been admitted to the hospital and placed on a ventilator. Bloom, best known as the star of the musical TV comedy “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” then goes home with her recovered baby just as Schlesinger, her collaborator on the series, dies from COVID-19. Literally in the next room.
So Bloom’s new solo comedy piece, “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” which opens Wednesday night at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre for a short mainstage run, has what you might call a resonant title.
The piece is part of a rising theatrical trend on Broadway: the solo comedy piece drawing from a performer’s life experience. Recent past successes include Mike Birbiglia (“Sleepwalk With Me,” “The Old Man and the Pool”), Alex Edelman (“Just for Us”) and now, Bloom. All three will have appeared at Steppenwolf which, like many regional companies, has cut back some on its own productions and now finds itself with weeks to fill and a very appealing brand and venue for commercially produced shows designed for a 30- and 40-something demographic. Bloom certainly fits that category, Although it also has a new streaming following among some younger viewers, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” ran for four seasons on The CW from 2015 to 2019.
Bloom wrote, directed and starred in the show about a New York lawyer who freaks out at work and decides on a whim to move across the country to pursue her former boyfriend. Wildly personal, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” never was a ratings smash, Bloom not being for all tastes, but its fans are loyal and enthusiastic. In Williamstown, they could be seen (and heard) as they sat among the quieter, dressier set summering in the Berkshires and just looking for a night out.
Before COVID, in 2019, Bloom had decided to do a raunchy live show starting with a tree with an aroma of sperm and riffing from there. That kind of thing worked for Birbiglia, with whom Bloom shares a director in Seth Barrish.
Then all of the above happened: new life, profound fear, sudden death.
The year 2021, she came to realize, was not 2019.
“It felt to me like death was the ultimate heckler who had just completely blown up my life,” says Bloom, strikingly cheerily, in a post-show chat after her funny, honest, fan-pleasing show. So she ended up with a piece largely about mortality.
“I just started writing new songs and words in 2021,” she says. “I tried to hang on to a lot of my material from 2019 because there was part of me that didn’t want to waste that work. But when I would rewatch the tapes of myself, I realized I had to throw all of that out.”
And so she did. “Death, Let Me Do My Show” bowed off-Broadway 11 months ago at New York’s Lucille Lortel Theater. Bloom’s brand is a studied but low-in-the-body kind of unvarnished honesty but her on-stage character also is a spinning top, buffeted by life’s events. Vulnerable but cheerfully profane, confident but suffering from anxiety, Bloom’s sparkly on-stage version of herself talks, rapid-fire, about sex, showbiz, friendship, bodily fluids, silly coincidences and, she being a fan of musical theater, “Dear Evan Hansen.” Death, though, is always ready to interrupt.
You get stand-up comedy with clever little songs between; Bloom has both a vaudevillian streak and an absurdist trait wrapped in emotional need. She’s a close observer of life’s weirdnesses.
“I see this as a stand-up show that’s a little bit wrapped in a musical and a little bit wrapped in a storytelling show,” she says. “I guess it has its own kind of structure that we just had to figure out on the go.”
At the time, she doesn’t want to talk abut the upcoming filming of the piece for a comedy special on Netflix, which is at least partly why she is doing her show in Williamstown, but a few weeks later, that’s announced for an unspecified date. Steppenwolf is part of a short tour before everyone can see the piece (which will surely be better experienced live) on their screens.
“COVID was obviously a lot more current when I started working on the show,” she says, that night in Williamstown. “But what remains current is the world being horrific and death being present and feeling unprepared for trauma.”
She says she wants her next show to be a deconstruction of a pop concert. Unless life intervenes.
“Death, Let Me Do My Show” runs Aug. 14-24 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; tickets $59-$129 at 312-335-1650 and www.steppenwolf.org
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
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