Broadway in Chicago’s “Death Becomes Her”/Photo: Jenny Anderson

“I grew up here,” says producer Chris Herzberger, sitting in the upstairs lobby of Broadway in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre. “I grew up in Naperville and was an actor at Chicago Shakespeare, the Royal George and Drury Lane Oakbrook before I moved to L.A. and went to film school. This is home for me.

“I’ve been enjoying going for runs along the river every morning, and every time I see the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, it’s mind-blowing. I think of thirteen-year old Chris Herzberger at Chicago Shakespeare Theater having no clue that someday I would be doing something like this back here. It’s pretty awesome.”

Herzberger’s family is still here, so there has been lots of family time while Herzberger has been working on the launch of the pre-Broadway world premiere of the musical of “Death Becomes Her,” in previews at the Cadillac Palace with a May 19 opening.

“His parents have officially adopted me because we’re best friends,” says producer Lowe Cunningham. Herzberger oversees the theater division of Universal Pictures, Cunningham is its vice president.

“For us to be in this community with an audience that we know is such a high bar because there’s so much extraordinary theater here,” says Herzberger. “It makes us better because we know that we have to live up to their expectations. But it also gives us great confidence in the feedback that we get from audiences here because we know how sophisticated they are.”

Herzberger and Cunningham have been working together “for years mining the film catalog to find great theatrical opportunities that we think could translate well into delicious exciting theatrical experiences,” as Herzberger puts it. “For years, people had been hounding us for the rights to ‘Death Becomes Her.’ Through a number of exciting conversations with various artists when the time was right as a group, we decided let’s give it a go. That was a decade ago. We started working with our book writer Marco Pennette to figure out how to put these story beads into a musical structure.”

“In addition to there being a lot of general interest,” says Cunningham, “adapting a film to stage means it wants to have an inherent theatricality in its nature, which this has in spades. It felt like there were big moments that were screaming to be musicalized for two big musical theater nerds such as ourselves.”

“It’s extreme everything,” says Herzberger. “Extreme emotion. Extreme humor. Extreme story piece. Things that are more than just everyday occurrences and everyday people. ‘Death Becomes Her’ is populated by absolutely over-the-top rich, complex hysterical individuals that you just want to spend time with.

“Outside of that, for us, when you’ve got illusions and magic—and our show has a lot of exciting secrets that achieve some of the really thrilling effects that exist within this—and combine that with a world of thunder and lightning and castles and mystery and mayhem and murder, it’s just so rich for the theater. If you look at the tradition of the theater over hundreds and thousands of years, those are exactly the kinds of stories that we’ve been telling for generations.”

“A moment that I remember thinking about in the very early stages of imagining in my own mind what this could be is a scene that I loved from the movie when Helen, the Goldie Hawn character, comes to the house,” says Cunningham. “She’s clearly made some sort of change or transformation. She looks incredible. She very seductively and effortlessly convinces this man to commit murder and get him to think, ‘This is a great idea. This is your way out.’ That is a heightened idea. I personally would imagine that through song and what that could be. Almost like an aria that could be rich, sexy, funny. But also, when you think about what is actually happening, disconcerting. It’s kind of ripe for what I imagine to be a wonderful moment. There are a lot of moments like that. It’s a big musical. Eighteen pieces. It’s incredibly lush, incredibly rich.”

“Our book writer Marco Pennette (“Caroline In The City”) was an extremely successful television writer, but who came from deep roots in the theater,” says Herzberger. “We as producers were going around town having substantial composers and lyricists submit songs in order to demonstrate how they would approach the score to ‘Death Becomes Her.’

“Through their agent, a songwriting couple came our way—Julia Mattison and Noel Carey—that wanted to write a spec song. And we essentially said, ‘We’ve never heard of them, and this is the biggest title we have in our Universal library. So, thank you, but this is not going to be the one for them.’

“And they still asked if they could submit a song; they actually submitted two songs. Lowe and I listened to the first song, it’s called ‘Falling Apart,’ and it’s still in the show. We were sitting in my office and we looked at each other and said almost in unison, ‘My goodness. We have to hire them!’”

“It is a weird thing to be relative unknowns in the overall schemes of things,” admits Mattison. “And then have the opportunity to have such a major production support us and support our voices. They could have easily gone with fancy, decorated names.”

“It was great that they didn’t hire us for us,” says Carey, “but for what we were able to bring to the piece and allow our material to speak for itself.”

Broadway in Chicago’s “Death Becomes Her”/Photo: Jenny Anderson

Mattison and Carey are both composers and lyricists, unusual for a songwriting team, where one partner usually specializes in one or the other. “We both do both,” explains Carey. “We ping-pong. It’s a ‘Yes, and.’ Sometimes we start from different places. Sometimes she starts with a lyric or a melody. Or I start with a vamp or a title.”

“He’s a piano savant in a way I’m not,” admits Mattison. “He puts out these chord progressions in a way that I’m like, ‘Go! Be free!’ I love lining up lyric and melody. When we have to divide and conquer, we can. But also, just us in a room is its most pure fun because we’re both musical improv people, too. We just kind of like to find a tone and we talk a lot about it and then we just play and it comes from a place.”

“It’s a lot of ‘What about this? Do you like this?’” says Carey.

“And I’ll send a lyric,” says Mattison, “and he’ll go, ‘Yes, but maybe take this, change that one, this, and then send a new one to me.’ One song is never done the same way as another. It’s never been a formula for us. Every song is a very different approach because we just find it.”

Both Mattison and Carey also share a deep love of the film “Death Becomes Her.”

“I was deeply obsessed,” admits Mattison. “I watched it a lot in college with friends. I thought it was just so campy and funny and ridiculous. Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. The whole cast is just so rich and outrageous and wonderful that I was very obsessed with it. We’re both huge [director] Robert Zemeckis fans, and of [film composer] Alan Silvestri.”

“I came to ‘Death Becomes Her’ much later,” says Carey, “but my favorite movie of all time is ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ which is also Robert Zemeckis and Alan Silvestri. A lot of things that haven’t been done before or since. And that was only a few years away from this movie so it’s from that same pocket of their careers. It totally shaped us growing up.”

“Our incredible composer-lyricists Julia and Noel have written things that are off-the-charts good,” says Jennifer Simard, who plays the role of Helen. “I think people are going to be so impressed with them as a writing duo. I am blown away with what they wrote. They also have been so wonderful at catering it to our specific strengths and have been quite collaborative about where things sit in our voices. You can sound good or amazing based on the key, things like that. They’re just a dream to work with.

“There are so many great songs that I think it would be a great night to sing to you all the songs that just didn’t make it to the final story. But what’s amazing about these two is they keep topping themselves. Everything cut becomes an opportunity to make it even better. It’s all about your outlook and staying positive and childlike excitement and joy about the art of the possible. And this team is really great at just finger-painting and keeping it messy to find something clean and gorgeous.”

“The show is so campy,” says Christopher Sieber, who plays the role of Ernest. “It’s basically ‘Dynasty’ with music. Ernest is the only real person in the show. He’s the observer. He’s in the center of a tornado.

“The source material has been elevated beyond the movie script. A lot of times they take a movie script and shove songs in there. But we get to tell the story our own way. I think it’s ten times funnier than the movie. The three [book, music and lyrics] are writing as one comedic voice. It’s amazing.”

“One of the exciting things for us artistically is that if you love the movie—and we love the movie—that this be a deep and satisfying piece of theater that is true to the world and the tone and spirit of the film,” says Herzberger.

“But it’s so important to ask that a piece of theater lives on its own,” adds Cunningham. “This is something that used the film as a blueprint but has fully evolved into a new piece of musical theater. You do not have to have seen the film to come and thoroughly enjoy the tale of these people and what they’re going through. It is a piece of theater you could come from downbeat one and have no information and laugh your face off and enjoy the ride.”

“It is populated with surprising twists and turns that are nowhere to be found in the film that feel entirely right in the world of ‘Death Becomes Her,’” says Herzberger. “It is not the movie onstage but is respectful of—and I think a great tribute to—the film, but an entirely new, organic piece of theater that could only exist in a building like this.”

Through June 2 at Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 West Randolph. Tickets at broadwayinchicago.com.