Death Becomes Her review: Leading ladies claws are out in funny Broadway camp fest

Two hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission.At the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, 205 W.

46th Street.There is a miracle elixir in the campy musical “Death Becomes Her,” which opened Thursday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.I don’t mean the nuclear-pink liquid that offers eternal youth in exchange for becoming the walking dead, but the comedy chops of stars Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard.Simply put, they kill it.As the pair of envious, vengeful, demented and eventually deceased narcissists originally played by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, the actresses wring jokes out of every letter and semicolon of Marco Pennette’s catty book. No moment is wasted — and Simard and Hilty are such no-holds-barred risk-takers that they themselves could very well be wasted.Their warped characters from Robert Zemeckis’ culty 1992 movie are the glamorous actress Madeline Ashton (Hilty) and dowdy writer Helen Sharp (Simard), competitive frenemies obsessed with savagely one-upping each other.So, it would seem, are Simard and Hilty.The game pair duke it out for a laugh, and the crowd laps up their verbal and actual jabs as though it’s a WWE match.

(Although a quick scan around the house would suggest that nobody at “Death Becomes Her” has so much as accidentally turned on a WWE match).The audience’s howls, especially during the vastly superior first act, help distract from a slippery situation for a massive new musical: The songs by Julia Mattison and Noel Carey are mediocre.And there are far too many of them.Lyrics are often clever and naughty, but melody is cast aside in favor of vocal acrobatics.

The sole memorable tune, the main theme, is only hummable because it’s a dead ringer for the dark title song of “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”This show’s most entertaining number is the razzmatazz second one.Helen and her doctor fiancé Ernest (Christopher Sieber, good as ever, but underused) go see Madeline in the Broadway show “Me! Me! Me!” and Hilty belts out...