The Death Note musical solves the anime’s biggest problem

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Death notice follows a high school student named Light who happens to be the smartest person in the world. One day, Light comes into possession of a notebook called the Death Note, which can be used to kill any person in the world by simply writing down their name. Light is also able to use it to summon a Shinigami demon named Ryuk, who seems to be primarily interested in causing chaos and mischief in order to destroy his boring immortality. The young genius hopes to dispense lethal justice that the police cannot, but the power quickly goes to his head. He decides that a world kept peaceful by his murders is best for everyone, so he uses the Death Note to conquer the world under the altar ego Kira through fear. Meanwhile, the other smartest person in the world, another high school student named L, is tasked by the police with uncovering Kira’s identity in hopes of stopping his rampages.

The Death notice Anime was first released in 2007 and proved to be a canary in the coal mine for the upcoming Dark Knight-ification of pop culture. Especially in its earlier episodes, the studio Madhouse used all the traditional features of a shonen anime, telling a more complicated, darker, and serious story than almost anything else coming out at the time. The protagonists, obviously in high school, still narrated their next move in still images. But the story itself felt like a grounded, adult mystery, more in the style of a film like Seven than a show like Dragon Ball.

Image: Viz Media

There’s nothing wrong with taking a somewhat silly premise seriously, and in the series’ best moments, director Tetsurō Araki fully deserves that dignity.

The series revolves around the duel between Light and L for the first 15 episodes and is as entertaining and exciting as almost any anime. The whole thing is set up like a game of chess, with each player setting traps, anticipating their opponents’ feints and planning their countermoves three or four steps in advance. It’s twisted, entertaining and a little ridiculous in just the right proportions.

Things got out of context as the series raced toward its conclusion. The battle between Light and L added so many characters, companies, rules, moves and countermoves that the stakes became unclear. And as often happens at the end of crime dramas, characters start making uncharacteristic mistakes that feel dictated by the needs of the plot and like a betrayal of their previous wisdom—and that’s exactly what happens to L.

The back and forth between L and Light is the heart and soul of Death notice. When the anime dropped L, it never really recovered. After a five-year time jump, two new characters are introduced to investigate Kira, but neither of them really seem like a compelling opponent for Light, leading the show to a disappointing ending that invalidates everything that came before.

Photo: James Dittiger/Netflix

Netflix’s first live-action version of Death notice (“first”, because supposedly another one from the makers of Stranger Things) avoided some of these problems by freely adapting the story and cutting out the post-L storyline entirely, making the whole thing more like a high school movie in plot and tone. In the Hollywood version, Light (Nat Wolff) lacks most of his ambition, is certainly no genius, and instead uses the Death Note mainly to exact revenge on bullies and kill a few criminals. The gruesome action nonetheless prompts L (LaKeith Stanfield) to take up his cause.

While the American version is generally derided by fans, it is… not terrible. Director Adam Wingard leans into the inherent silliness of Death noticeand refuses to take the material too seriously, which is a welcome change from the eternally serious anime. But this version also fails to bring the confrontation between Light and L to a satisfying conclusion, opting for a ridiculous, staged finale instead of an ironclad battle of wits between the two main characters.

And that brings us to the musical. Originally written in 2014 as a concept album with music by Frank Wildhorn (Jekyll & Hyde), lyrics by Jack Murphy (Civil war) and a book by Ivan Menchell, the Death notice The musical has since been performed a number of times around the world, with the final version due to hit the West End in 2023. And it’s a blast. The musical theatre is a perfect venue for the kind of internal monologues that shonen anime have always relied on, and by sprucing up the songs it maintains the slightly more mature flavour that the anime is aiming for.

The musical version is a fairly faithful adaptation of the first 15 or so episodes of the anime, with Wildhorn spinning rock opera songs out of Light’s initial frustration with the legal system, L and Light’s witty tennis match, and Ryuk’s general amusement with humanity – complete with an incredible demon costume last worn by Broadway legend Adam Pascal. The show ends with the story focused on L and Light, where it should have been from the beginning. This version gives L and Light a final confrontation that is denied to them in the anime, with L finding out for sure that Light is Kira shortly before his death by the Death Note. After L dies, Ryuk complains that his life will be boring since Light has no one to challenge him, so the demon pulls out his own personal Death Note and writes Light’s name on it as he begs for his own life.

It’s a grim ending, no doubt, but a perfectly ironic way to expose Light’s hubris in his moment of victory. Just when he’s decided he’s now a god on Earth, something truly supernatural decides to remind him where his power came from, putting an end to him in the blink of an eye. It’s a decision that thwarts all the cleverness and plotting of the story up to this point, a reminder that at the end of the day, no matter how clever the characters are, they’re still just human. At the same time, it lets Ryuk say out loud what fans and viewers have already suspected: there is no story without L and Light. A version of this story where they don’t face off isn’t worth telling.

The only problem with this version of the story, of course, is that it only exists in a musical that few will ever get to see. Luckily, you can listen to the concept album recording on YouTube, and if you stop the anime at episode 15, you can imagine the better ending. Because more importantly, Death notice than killing something a little earlier in the service of the community?