LET'S MAKE A DEAL

"Death Becomes Her" and "Burnout Paradise."

- HELEN SHAW

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard are comic divas of the first order.

In a Faustian bargain, there's little suspense about how things will end. The Devil doesn't hand anything over beauty, knowledge, power - without first laying down some heavy hints. And so it goes as the lights dim for the musical "Death Becomes Her,"by the songwriters Julia Mattison and Noel Carey and the book writer Marco Pennette, at the Lunt-Fontanne. As thunder rumbles and lightning flickers, Isabella Rossellini's disembodied voice, insinuating and delicious, purrs a warning: "Silence your cell phones."

The camp-o-meter is already loading, and the show, directed by Christopher Gattelli, hasn't even begun. (Soon to come: a quick change for an actress into a Judy Garland-as-Dorothy costume, complete with a stuffed Toto tossed up into her arms from the orchestra pit.) Rossellini is not physically in this show - she played the Mephistopheles figure in the Robert Zemeckis film, from 1992, on which the musical is based - but her vocal cameo reverberates. As with so many of these adaptations of movies, the makers want to summon our nostalgia for the source, without necessarily jogging our memory of its flaws.

The narrative bones of the Zemeckis film, which starred Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as homicidal frenemies, remain intact. The self-obsessed actress Madeline Ashton (Megan Hilty, escaping Streep's ice-queen shadow by running hot) greets her old chum and rival, the drab wannabe writer Helen Sharp (Jennifer Simard), backstage after a Broadway show. Madeline instantly hankers after Helen's fiancé, the plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Christopher Sieber), and, when Ernest allows himself to be stolen away, Helen snaps.