[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: City Song]

Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart Live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. If you couldn't be with us each and every day, every moment of our show, if you missed any of our conversations this week, you might want to go back and catch up on them, especially as you head into the weekend. The film Leave the World Behind is now streaming on Netflix. We spoke with director Sam Esmail about it yesterday. He told us to make sure we look at the art. Very interesting part of that conversation.

Your plans could include walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You'll want to check out our conversation with Gavin Creel, he came in studio on Monday to talk about his show Walk On Through. It's an off-Broadway musical about his experiences at that museum. It was a really joyous conversation about art and creation. Speaking of the Met, next week, we'll hear about a new exhibit there, women dressing women, celebrating women designers. Next week we'll also be joined by the director of the new film version of The Color Purple. Now, that is all in the future, but right now let's stay present and get this hour started with a very funny and moving show about death.

Rachel Bloom's new show isn't exactly the one she had originally set out to write before the pandemic. In fact, she starts the show by inviting the audience with her back to 2019 when life was rosy. As the show progresses, 2020 and the effects of the pandemic start to seep in. She realizes that her pre-2020 script isn't working anymore, especially because she still hasn't processed the trauma of the death of her close friend and writing partner from COVID, and the difficulties around the birth of her child, both of which happened in the same week.

Death, Let Me Do My Show has toured the country and even across the Pond in London. Rachel joined us to discuss the show during its run at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village early this fall. Now she's back for a winter run at the Orpheum in the East Village. The show opened yesterday and is running through January 6th. I began by asking Rachel Bloom about the original plan for the pre-pandemic version of the show, which was different from how the 2023 version turned out.

Rachel Bloom: I was, in 2018 and 2019, working on new stand-up material and new comedy songs to be a new, basically a musical comedy stand-up special. At the time I had some tentative offers from streamers. Now the special market has completely changed, but that's a whole other story. I wanted to stay here officially, this is an hour of me as a stand-up and a musical comedian just doing original new work. I had that all outlined on a whiteboard in my office, and then 2020 happened and a lot of stuff went down.

One day I was playing with my infant daughter in my office, that had now become also her playroom. I was looking at the whiteboard with all of the bits in this new comedy special I wanted to do. When you bullet point out comedy bits or comedy songs, it looks especially stupid and frivolous because you're somewhere-- I'm trying to think of a clean way to say it. It reads like, "Bicycle, pregnancy."

Alison Stewart: Shopping at Costco.

Rachel Bloom: "Cats are mad." It just looks so silly, and I was looking at that outline and thinking, "This is so stupid. I can't do this. I'm not going to go back after everything that's happened, to do that special." I thought about it and I went, "What if there was a world in which I tried to and then there was something that says, "No, you're not being real."

Alison Stewart: In the show, you talk about how you really weren't engaging with COVID at the beginning when everyone was first talking about it. You weren't dealing with it, you were very pregnant at the time about to give birth. When you look back on it, why weren't you engaging with the seriousness of COVID?

Rachel Bloom: I don't think I really believed it was going to be a thing in the beginning. I don't know why. I think that something else the show tackles is my brain is in many ways very binary. I'm either incredibly happy and upbeat, or I get very, very, very dark, and part of what I do as an artist is marry those two, and they often clash. They don't go together. I think that I was pregnant, and I was just focusing on other things. It didn't seem real to me.

I had changed my brain to just not worry about it, and I let my husband do the bulk of the pandemic worrying, to the point when we checked into the hospital for me to give birth, he said, "Put on a mask," and I said, "Oh, come on." He was like, "Put on a mask. Are you insane right now?" Then ahead of us, the guy checking into the hospital, we overheard him saying, "I can't breathe. I can't breathe." I remember my husband turning to me, and going, "Maybe it's a heart attack."

Alison Stewart: God, comedy writers in the hospital. It's always a challenge.

Rachel Bloom: It didn't seem real, and I think that a lot of people were in that space, even though by the time I gave birth in late March, it was getting very real in New York. I just decided to focus on having a baby, and then it all was very real very quickly.

Alison Stewart: In the show, we learn, and it's a story you're personal about. You had these two giant life experiences happen at the same time. You had the death of your dear friend, creative collaborator, Adam Schlesinger, a lot of folks remember him from Fountain of Wayne as well. A super somber moment. Then also, your daughter's born, but there were some complications. Yet somehow in the show you make us laugh around these moments as well as you feel really all of your sadness. Was it always the plan to weave humor into that part of the story?

Rachel Bloom: No. I've been developing the writing of the show for about two years, and it's been a process, it's been a journey. I think, though, humor always leaks into what I do because life is just absurd. I think the show in my head seeks to answer two questions for myself. The first one is, how do you acknowledge death but continue to live? You don't do what I did in 2020, you don't stay ignorant of what's going on, you don't try to just shut it out, but how do you then not let thoughts of death and the realization that death is always coming for you, take over your life? That's the first question, but the second one is, what is the role of silliness?

I remember looking at that whiteboard in my office and the silly bullet points and going, "This is so silly. This is so frivolous," but also when I was going through what I was going through in March, April, May 2020, one of the things that saved me was silly podcast, silly movies. There's something about laughing that almost makes you forget death, and this was in previous versions of the show and it lifted out. The show begins and ends with something incredibly stupid and incredibly silly because there is a place for silliness in all of it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Rachel Bloom. The name of the show is Death, Let Me Do My Show. How did you take care of yourself during the writing process? You had to relive a bunch of not-great or really sad moments.

Rachel Bloom: By the time I really started talking about it, everything had been about a year and a half in the past, and I had talked about it a lot. I talked about it a lot in therapy. I talked about it a lot with my husband. I think that more than anything, I had processed it in my personal narrative, if that makes any sense. There are certain things that happen to you where they happen, and they're almost so shocking, it's not part of the story you tell yourself about yourself.

I think having a baby is like that. I think I was a parent for four months before. Basically, for the first four months of my daughter's life, the way I felt was, "When are these people going to come and pick up their baby?" That we're somehow babysitting. You don't internalize you're a parent. It almost sounds like you're cosplaying being a parent. Every time I said, "My daughter," it sounded weird. It was like when I got engaged, and I said, "My fiancé," it just sounded weird. Everything a year and a half later had sipped in. I don't know, I'd processed it.

It didn't feel like picking a scab, it actually felt very cathartic to retell a story that was now part of my narrative, but that I still now wanted to communicate to other people, because there's something really helpful to me about being open about hard points in my life because it shows I'm not alone. It's as much for me as it is for other people that if I can share a story about something that was hard, 9 times out of 10 people will say, "Oh, I've been through that."

Alison Stewart: You talked about how that show seeks to answer the question of how you live with knowing that death's around, a death's going to chase you down. We learn about death from our parents and our family, what were you taught about death growing up?

Rachel Bloom: My father's parents died when I was very young. I remember my grandmother died when I was four, so I didn't really understand it. Then my mother's parents died when I was in college and they had had a slow decline. There was grief, but there was something of, there was a decline and also, I was in college and I was selfish and a terrible person, I'm sure. I was sad, but it didn't rock my world. I knew this is what happens. People get old and they die. Sudden death, unexpected death, someone dying young just feels so different to me.

I was talking to a friend whose father passed away after a long time battle with cancer. My friend Adam, incidentally, but another Adam. He said something amazing, which he's like, "It was the longest Jewish goodbye," because there's this term, a Jewish goodbye where you're at a party and you're, "I'm saying goodbye." Then you talk to everyone, so it takes an hour. I felt that was so funny. He'd seen my show and then we had a long conversation about the difference between gradual death and sudden death. I think there is something too grief of something you're expecting versus sudden grief.

As I acknowledge in the show, I'm very new to grief. There are experiences I say, I'm sure people in this audience have gone through way worse than what I'm describing. I'm still learning about what place grief has in our lives. I just think as a culture, we don't talk about death. We didn't talk about it much when I was growing up.

Alison Stewart: There's a part of the show, and I'm not giving anything away, when you're talking about like, "Hey, there's not an afterlife." You described yourself as an atheist in the show. It's the spookiest scariest ghost with a refrain, like, "Ghosts aren't real." As I started, I went down an atheist rabbit hole, just thinking like, "Oh, what about American atheists?" I found, this I could be the name of your next show, 10 facts about atheists from the Pew Center.

Rachel Bloom: Oh, I'm very excited.

Alison Stewart: 4% of Americans identify as atheists. 7 in 10 US atheists are men. They tend to be White and educated and aligned with the Democratic party and political liberalism. When did you come to atheism?

Rachel Bloom: When I was in college, I think I always-- Up until college, I had this vague spirituality where I was like, "Oh, the universe will carry me." Then one day I just thought-- To be honest, I was in a class where I learned about the history of apartheid, and we went, at the end of it, to South Africa.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Rachel Bloom: I went to Robin Island where people had been imprisoned for crimes of apartheid. It was just a very intense trip. There's something that occurred to me on that trip, which is how privileged it is of me to say, "Oh, the universe always takes care of you." Went, "No, no, it doesn't." I feel the universe takes care of me because I'm going to art school in New York City or whatever, but no, that's a privileged selfish thing to say, "Oh, the universe looks out for people."

It made me realize, what if there is no cushion? What if the universe isn't looking out for you? What if it's chaos? What if there is a vastness and a coldness? What that made me realize is what if I'm fully responsible for my own actions? It was this moment, I remember I was in a classroom and I realized this. It felt like a moment other people described when they have a religious awakening. It suddenly was like, it was scary. It was horrifying, but I started to live my life as if, "Okay, nothing's going to catch me. There's no rhyme or reason. Everything is my responsibility."

It made me a better person. It motivated me more to go into therapy. It motivated me more to be responsible for my actions and treat people better. That's how I continue to live my life. It's interesting, I've always been interested in sci-fi and the paranormal, and I think a lot of people who come to atheism and skepticism are, but they know that there's a lot of fraud in that space. A lot of people in the skeptic community, of which I'm on the fringes of, part of the reason you're skeptical is you want to find the real thing. You want to find the real alien, you want to find the real ghost.

I've read a couple of books about the scientific studies of the afterlife. I would love for there to be something more. Once I shook the idea of, the universe will always take care of things, it just changed my life. Then, obviously, when I experienced death, that doesn't become as easy. At least for me, it was a lot scarier. I did a 180. I was like, "Oh, I don't want this anymore. I don't want there to be nothing. I don't like this." Thinking that made me a better person in life, but the vastness and the coldness of the universe was too much. Of course, this is one of the main things that religion gives to people.

I think maybe in America, one of the reasons we don't talk about death is because if most people believe in an afterlife, why would you talk about death if death isn't the end? It's something I've been grappling with. In the show, I talked to the fact that I talked to a psychic shortly after Adam died. I do want there to be something more, but as I said, the atheist in me needs proof.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Death, Let Me Do My Show. My guest is Rachel Bloom. This show is toured across the country, is at all different cities. The New York show is fancy though. You've got this set by this Tony-winning designer, Beowulf Boritt, friend of the show, off-Broadway and Broadway veteran director, Seth Barish, a musical director who scores films. What's something you've been able to do with this version of your show that helped you achieve your goals?

Rachel Bloom: I think everywhere we were touring, so there are, without spoiling anything effects in the show, every place I tour, we never knew what capabilities a theater would have. The theaters we went to were all amazing, but it was a simple version of the show where it was like, "Here are the sound effects. What can you do with your lighting?" It was always a question mark how certain moments would turn out. Now that's not the case.

Then the set in the costume, all of it adds such a visual element that I just think is additive to what was already there in the writing. The debate with the show was always, how do we add onto what was already great about the show in its simple form and not change?

Alison Stewart: It's funny if you're in New York, you're doing your thing, you're familiar with New York, you went to NYU, and I follow you on Instagram, but recently, you've started to enjoy our subway system in 2023. It's changed a little bit since you've been back. Let's listen to you trying to, I think you're trying to get to your show?

Rachel Bloom: Yes. I schlep my ass to New York only to find that the J train only operates every 20 minutes. This is bullshit. You need to make it up to me, so buy tickets to my show, rachelbloomshow.com.

I was taking the J train I had just checked into my Airbnb and I was actually taking the train to my-- What?

Alison Stewart: Don't say Airbnb, or is it allowed?

Rachel Bloom: The place I'm staying-- Is it allowed? Wait, is it out loud now?

Alison Stewart: The place Rachel's staying, continue. [laughs]

Rachel Bloom: I don't know. Oh, okay. The place I'm staying, and I get on the J and I was actually on my way to my New York Times photo shoot and interview. They offered to send a car and I went, "No, the Subway's always going to be quicker." I'm actually still glad I took the Subway because a car would've been slower, especially on Labor Day weekend going to Coney Island, but it was rough.

Alison Stewart: Do you get recognized on the Subway?

Rachel Bloom: No. I'm not that famous.

Alison Stewart: I think you probably are, but maybe some [crosstalk]

Rachel Bloom: You know what? I was wearing a mask, but no. I'm the type of famous where if you know me, you know me, but most people have no idea. I like that.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. I don't know if you've been able to see outside of the theater. The poster for the show is really gorgeous. It looks like this vintage horror movie poster, and it's you in this red form-fitting dress and you have a microphone. You're fleeing and the Grim Reaper is chasing you. First of all, who designed it and have you seen what people are doing? It's very funny.

Rachel Bloom: I haven't seen what people are doing. It was designed by these wonderful artists, Dave and Jess, and you can go on my Instagram and find their full credits and handles. They are just both incredibly brilliant. My director and I, we said, "Hey, is there a way to make it look like almost a pulp horror novel cover or a B movie from the '50s or '60s," and they just went above and beyond. I haven't seen what people are doing. Are they posing like it?

Alison Stewart: They're pretending. They're fleeing with you.

Rachel Bloom: Oh, great. I love that.

Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, we don't have much time, but you were a musical theater kid. You've talked about it but you do not musical comedy. You do comedy musicals, it's interesting, right?

Rachel Bloom: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Is there some trope that you wanted to send up in this? There are jazz handy musical comedy songs and this was, there's something about musical comedy that you really wanted to just give a little tweak to.

Rachel Bloom: Oh, almost every number except for the last one is a pastiche of something. I would say The Deepest Cut is the first song, the title of which can't be spoken here, I say it's a reference to Mary Poppins to be accessible, but actually, it's very much inspired by a couple songs by Noel Coward. Namely, there's a song called Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.

That was very inspirational to me and then there's another song, I believe this is Irving Berlin. This is like 1910 called, If You Don't Want My Peaches, You Better Stop Shaking My Tree. Basically, that first song is actually doing a deep, deep, deep cut into American music turn of the century. Very poppish.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with actor, writer, and comedian Rachel Bloom about her show called Death, Let Me Do My Show which is running at the Orpheum Theater in New York through January 6th.

 

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