‘Only Murders in the Building’ review: This time it’s a musical!

Having solved two murders already, the amateur sleuths and podcasting neighbors of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” go for a hat-trick. The latest victim is the star of a Broadway play called “Death Rattle,” and he’s a self-involved Hollywood actor played by Paul Rudd.

Directed by Oliver (Martin Short) in his triumphant return to the Great White Way, “Death Rattle” is a murder mystery. Of course it is. The play’s lead swans in late to the first day of rehearsals brandishing an inflated ego and a pile of NDAs for everyone to sign. He’s best known for his “CoBro” film franchise about a “friendly zoologist who morphs into a 20-foot cobra and helps the cops save the day.” Is he a cobra? Yeah. Is he a bro? Yeah. “That’s how you gross two bill, not with subtle — subtle doesn’t sell!” he informs Oliver, who is hoping to draw out a more complicated performance for the guy’s Broadway debut.

Well, it doesn’t matter either way, because after opening night he’s dead. And the show’s producers — a wealthy Upper East Side type (Linda Emond) and her codependent adult son (Wesley Taylor) — are pulling the plug. But wait, Oliver has an idea to turn the fusty “Death Rattle” into a musical instead: “Death Rattle Dazzle” (jazz hands).

Emond has always been a great actor (and might be most recognizable from appearances on various incarnations of “Law & Order”) but she’s never been given quite this kind of opportunity to really chew some scenery the way she does here when Oliver tries to sell her on the musical. As written, her monologue is richly observed and cynical and so right about what makes a Broadway musical a success, and her delivery is a master class in barely contained over-the-topness:

You need a showstopper, she tells Oliver. That’s how musicals make money. You need a song so irresistible “it’s like a syringe that shoots from Broadway straight into the neck of Debbie from Duluth, who becomes an addict the first second she hears it during girls’ night out at the Calorie Pit. And an addict will do anything — anything — to get her fix, even take a middle seat on a redeye to New York City where, for the low, low price of everything she’s got, Debbie can have the privilege of sitting in the finest rear balcony seat in all the land to finally, finally see that show with that song she can’t stop belting out all over Duluth.”

So, she asks: “Do you have anything that good? Do you have (dramatic pause) a showstopper?”

Emond doesn’t get much to do for the remainder of the season. But that speech is a showstopper all its own.

As for the mystery at hand: Who killed the plays’s original star? When he turns up dead (yes, in the building!), Jackie Hoffman’s sourpuss, no-baloney neighbor — who has been through this mishegoss twice already — has the one-liner the moment deserves: “You gotta be (expletive) kidding me.”

Before he’s snuffed out, Rudd plays the guy as such a perfectly disruptive and ridiculous presence that anyone in his orbit is a potential suspect. That includes a fellow cast member played by Meryl Streep as an actress finally getting her big break late in life, and she’s rewarded with her own lullaby in the musical. Streep’s presence is a departure from the show’s more desperate-seeming celebrity cameos of seasons past. She doesn’t have a Broadway-caliber voice but it’s good enough, and her number is legitimately terrific, with ”Joy Ride” actor Ashley Park (as a dippy Gen Z influencer/actress) providing gorgeous harmony. It gave me chills. I am Debbie from Duluth!

Red herrings are exposed and secrets unravel. But Oliver, Charles (Steve Martin) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) aren’t quite the close-knit trio they once were. That warm-cranky friendship is still there. But for the most part, each is off doing their own thing and Mabel (who is too underdeveloped as a character) is the only one still committed to making the true-crime podcast that brought them together in the first place.

Co-created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, “Only Murders in the Building” is one of the best-scored shows in television, thanks to composer Siddhartha Khosla, rivaling only “Succession.” But there’s so much more this season because Oliver is writing a musical; “Death Rattle Dazzle’s” songs are courtesy of a melange of Broadway composing stalwarts including Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Streep’s ballad “Look for the Light” is also co-written by Sara Bareilles).

Melancholic undertones of loneliness and regret and bungled romantic attachments have always fueled the series, as well as the nurturing effects of new and old connections. This season, the friendships are fractured — or at least, not quite front and center the way they once were.

But Oliver remains such a deeply moving figure. This might be one of Short’s best performances of his career, balancing so many ideas and tones at once. It’s such an unlikely combination of outsized gestures and nuanced subtleties. Here is an actor who can embody a sadness accumulated over a lifetime, and in the next moment deliver a perfectly judged reaction shot.

Real love is for the brave, and “Only Murders in the Building” is forever poking and prodding around the courage and fear underlying that truism.

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'ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING'

3 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Hulu

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