Over the weekend, La Jolla Playhouse opened the world premiere musical "Grim." After 300,000 years of collecting souls, the Grim Reaper is looking for a replacement.
Passing on the family business is not always easy, especially when the business is death. Director Sammi Cannold said the new musical "Grim" imagines what happens when the Grim Reaper decides to retire.
"So 'Grim' tells the story of the Grim Reaper's daughter, Diana. And it's at a moment where the Grim Reaper is retiring and it is time for someone else to take the throne," Cannold explained. "And it becomes clear that Diana is the one who has to do it. But she falls in love with life vis-à-vis a friendship with a human that she's supposed to kill. And chaos ensues."
Because it turns out Diana cries over the death of a flower and might not be the best person to handle dispensing death on a daily basis.
Although this is a story about death, it's also about a father and a daughter.
"Absolutely. There's a family drama at the heart of this show," Cannold said. "There's also a young woman's coming-of-age story at the heart of the show. It has a lot of different sort of angles to it, and I think that even though it is a show about the Grim Reaper, and ostensibly is about things related to death. It is also a show that you're smiling and laughing through for the majority of the time. And then there are moments where, you know, the, the heartbreak hits you, of course. But I think that people might be surprised to find how joyous a show about death is."
And if you are expecting to see the Grim Reaper hanging out in a dark Goth world, think again.
"Our set designer, Jason Sherwood, and I chose to set the show within Limbo, which is the place that Grim and the other reapers that work with him, where they live," Cannold explained. "And we decided to take, alongside the other designers on the show who are incredible, to take an approach to the show where it would feel like a Pixar movie. Because we felt like this story has all this grandeur and theatricality of a Disney musical, but it's a little left of center. It's a little quirky. And so we decided, OK, if when we enter our design process, if every decision we make, we make through the lens of what would we do if we were making a Pixar movie, we'll make something that has that kind of zany, fun energy in addition to being spectacle-driven and exciting and comedic."
Although the tone is often comedic, the play does touch on more serious issues.
"I hope that people learn something about their relationship to life in terms of how they value the days they have," Cannold said. "And also for people who are currently going through loss, will go through loss, have gone through loss, which is all of us, that there's something that helps."
La Jolla Playhouse has extended the musical’s run through Dec. 6. You can see "Grim" at the Mandell Weiss Theatre.
And just for fun, here are my three favorite personifications of Death in movies: "The Seventh Seal" (1957) with the elegant Bengt Ekerot playing chess with Max Von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman's film; "Monty Python’s Meaning of Life" (1983) with John Cleese as the uninvited guest at a dinner party; and "Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey" (1991) with the delightful William Sadler as the Grim Reaper and then he returns as Death (not sure why the name change) for "Bill and Ted Face the Music" (2020).
