Death Becomes Her Adapter Marco Pennette on a Life in TV, Inheriting Linda Lavin’s Tony Award and Being in the Running for His Own

Marco Pennette’s road to the 2025 Tony Awards is paved with golden show business stories. A first-time nominee for his expertly crafted and hilarious adaptation of the 1992 film comedy Death Becomes Her, Pennette worked on a slew of sitcoms before making his Broadway debut at age 58. In the mysterious alchemy required to create a hit musical, Pennette did several things right: He identified Death Becomes Her as a movie that could be successfully adapted for the stage and suggested Kristin Chenoweth (who ultimately chose to commit to Stephen Schwartz’s The Queen of Versailles) and Jennifer Simard as leads. The show that resulted is now nominated for 10 Tonys, including Best Musical and a pair of coveted Best Actress nods for Simard and Megan Hilty in roles created on screen by Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep.

But let’s go back—way back—to Pennette’s childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, to chart his colorful path to a 2025 Best Book Tony nomination.

A DATE WITH HAL PRINCE
By age 13, Pennette had seen his favorite musical, Sweeney Todd, six times and set his sights on a career in the theater (“and my parents didn’t know I was gay,” he quips). He wrote a letter to Hal Prince and was rewarded with a phone call from the superstar director’s assistant inviting the enterprising teen to an in-person meeting—which led to an internship while Pennette was a student at NYU. “Much later, I asked Hal, ‘Why would you answer some kid’s terrible letter?’ And he said, ‘When I was 13, I wrote George Abbott a letter, and he became my mentor.’ Isn’t that incredible?”

Just as incredible is the fact that young Marco also wrote a letter to the iconic caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who promptly invited the boy and his parents to visit his studio. (More on Hirschfeld later.) As Pennette built a busy career writing and producing television comedies, including Caroline in the City, Mom and an Emmy win for Ugly Betty, Prince urged him not to give up on his theatrical dreams. “I put a little bit of Broadway into all my shows,” he says, “but, tick-tock, I kept moving from show to show, and finally Hal looked at me and said, ‘What are you waiting for?’”

A LIFE IN SITCOMS
Pennette’s Wikipedia page is filled with eye-popping personal details, many of which he eventually turned into TV shows. First up, in 2005, was Inconceivable, inspired by his journey to fatherhood. (Pennette and his husband are now the parents of three teenage daughters born via surrogacy.) A year later, in Crumbs, he explored his parents’ bitter divorce and his experience emerging from the closet. “Come on, aren’t we supposed to write what we know?” he says with a laugh. “My dad even said to me once, ‘You’re lucky I divorced your mom or you’d still be a waiter.’ And he’s kind of right.”

Finally, in 2020, the CBS series B Positive centered on a single dad (played by Eureka Day actor Thomas Middleditch) who needs a kidney transplant. Pennette had received a donated kidney several years earlier, “and as I’m being wheeled into the operating room, I’m thinking, ‘If I survive, this will make a great sitcom.’” The show, which ran for two seasons, also starred Tony winners Annaleigh Ashford and Linda Lavin. It was a happy reunion for Pennette and Lavin, who had become close friends when she appeared in his short-lived 1998 series Conrad Bloom.

A TONY WINNER’S KEEPSAKES
The first time Pennette met Linda Lavin to discuss Conrad Bloom, “She walked in dressed in skin-tight leopard pants, a fedora and beautiful jewelry and said, ‘I have some ideas about this role.’” Pennette had conceived “an apron-wearing/hair-in-curlers type of mother,” he recalls. “I looked at Linda and said, ‘If you want the part, I’ll take your ideas.’” Having savored Lavin’s Tony-winning performance as matriarch Kate Jerome in the 1986 comedy Broadway Bound, he eagerly quizzed her about working with Neil Simon and other career highlights.

Fast-forward to December 22, 2024, when Lavin and her husband, Steve Bakunas, attended a Christmas party at Pennette’s Los Angeles home. She had missed opening night of Death Becomes Her while filming the comedy Mid-Century Modern with Nathan Lane but was planning to see the musical in February. A week after the party, she passed away. Just days later, Pennette was surprised to see Bakunas at his door. “Steve brought me the original Hirschfeld [artwork] of Broadway Bound, autographed to Linda.” Then came the ultimate gift: Lavin’s Best Actress Tony statuette. “She wanted you to have this,” Bakunas said to the stunned Pennette. The award and the framed Hirschfeld now occupy a place of honor, “a little shrine” to Lavin, in the writer’s living room.

A TRIUMPH OVER DEATH
As he gets set for his own big night at the Tonys, Pennette is feeling thankful for the eight years and—by his estimation—70 rewrites it took to turn Death Becomes Her into a Broadway hit. Combing through the Universal Pictures film catalog, “I was drawn to those two amazing female leads,” he says. “And in a weird way, it felt like a small show tucked into a big show. Megan and Jen and Chris Sieber and Michelle Williams are our main characters, and I thought, ‘It’s four people. I can do that.’” Identifying material that could be transformed into a true musical comedy was also crucial: “That’s the gift I could bring to this, after writing half-hour comedies for 25 years. I love the sound of laughter in the theater, and I wanted to make a show that was funny. It was a wonderful collaboration with [composers] Julia Mattison and Noel Carey and [director/choreographer] Christopher Gattelli.”

The result, critics agree, honors the movie while taking the story to even dizzier comic heights. In addition to its baked-in gay following, Death Becomes Her now attracts “gaggles of women, middle-aged couples laughing out loud—everyone!” Pennette says with delight. His daughters gave a thumbs-up on opening night; his opinionated husband praised the show’s structure; his 85-year-old father laughed at a bit about dead doves at a wedding reception; screenwriter David Koepp bestowed his blessing; and Kristin Chenoweth came backstage to heap praise on Megan Hilty. All in all, it’s the Broadway version of a Hollywood ending.