75 Minutes With ...Rachel Bloom

The writer-comedian is reliving the lows of the pandemic on a never-ending loop. She swears it's good for you.

- By Emily Gould

A FEW YEARS AGO, Rachel Bloom’s 3-year-old asked her if she’s going to die. “My husband and I answered with ‘We are going to be around to care for you for a long time,’” she tells me in an East Village café across the street from the Orpheum. “And that assuaged her because she’s not actually asking if we’re going to die. From reading and talking to my own therapist, I know they’re asking, ‘Are you going to leave?’ Not ‘Explain the nature of death and decomposition to me.’” Then again, most toddlers’ mothers don’t have a job like Bloom’s.

Death, Let Me Do My Show, her one-woman Off Broadway production, is about Bloom’s longtime musical collaborator Adam Schlesinger’s sudden death from COVID complications in a New York hospital in April 2020, which coincided exactly with the birth and NICU stay of her first child on the opposite coast. Bloom’s daughter is now fine, but Schlesinger’s death floored Bloom in a way she was utterly unprepared to cope with, which is why, nearly four years later, she has found herself reliving it onstage every night in front of an audience in song and dance.