The Death Note musical solves the anime’s biggest problem

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Death Note follows a high schooler 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 that allows a person to kill anyone in the world simply by writing down their name. Light can also use it to summon a shinigami demon named Ryuk, who seems most interested in causing chaos and mischief to break up his boring immortality. The young genius hopes to deliver deadly justice that the police can’t, but the power quickly goes to his head. He decides that a world kept peaceful by his killings is what’s best for everyone, so he uses the Death Note to take over the world by fear under the altar-ego Kira. Meanwhile, the other smartest person in the world, another high schooler named L, is tasked by the police to uncover Kira’s identity in hopes of stopping his killing sprees.

The Death Note anime was first released in 2007, and turned out to be a canary in the coalmine for the upcoming Dark Knight-ification of pop culture. Especially in its earlier episodes, studio Madhouse took all the traditional trappings of a shonen anime and used it to tell a more complicated, darker, and more serious story than almost anything else out at the time. The protagonists, obviously in high school, still narrated their next move in freeze-frame. But the story itself felt like a grounded, adult mystery more in the vein of a movie like Seven than a show like Dragon Ball.

Image: Viz Media

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

For the first 15 or so episodes, the series revolves around Light and L going toe-to-toe and is as fun and exciting as almost any anime. The whole thing is laid out like a chess match, with each player setting traps, anticipating their opponents feints, and planning out their counter-moves three or four steps in advance. It’s twisty, fun, and a little ridiculous in exactly the right proportions.

Things got out of proportion as the series careened toward its conclusion. The battle between Light and L added so many characters, corporations, rules, moves, and counter-moves that the stakes got muddy. And as often happens at the end of mysteries, characters start making uncharacteristic mistakes that feel dictated by the needs of the plot and like betrayals of their previous cleverness — which is exactly what befalls L.

L and Light’s back and forth is the heart and soul of Death Note. When the anime dropped L, it never really recovered. After a five-year timeskip, two new characters are brought in to investigate Kira, but neither one really feels like a compelling match for Light, leading the show to a disappointing conclusion that cheapens everything that came before.

Photo: James Dittiger/Netflix

Netflix’s first live-action version of Death Note (“first” because another one is supposedly on the way from the creators of Stranger Things) averted some of this by loosely adapting the story and cutting out the post-L story entirely, making the whole thing more of a high school movie in plot and tone. In the Hollywood version, Light (Nat Wolff) is missing most of his ambition, certainly isn’t a genius, and instead mostly uses the Death Note to take revenge on bullies and kill a couple of criminals. The grisly activity still prompts L (LaKeith Stanfield) to hop on his case.

While the American version is generally derided by fans, it’s… not terrible. Director Adam Wingard leans into the inherent silliness of Death Note’s premise and refuses to take the material too seriously, which is a welcome change of pace from the eternally straight-faced anime. But this version also fails to bring Light and L’s face-off to a satisfying conclusion, opting for a ridiculous set-piece finale, rather than a steely battle of wits between the two main characters.

Which is what brings us to the musical. Originally written as a concept album in 2014 with music by Frank Wildhorn (Jekyll & Hyde), lyrics by Jack Murphy (The Civil War), and a book by Ivan Menchell, the Death Note musical has since been staged a few different times around the world, with the most recent version appearing on West End in 2023. And it rules. Musical theater is a perfect venue for the kind of internal monologues that shonen anime has always relied on, and the dressing up of songs lets it maintain the slightly more mature flavor that the anime is going 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 early frustration with the justice system, L and Light’s witty tennis match, and Ryuk’s general amusement with humanity — complete with an incredible demon costume most recently worn by Broadway legend Adam Pascal. The show ends by centering the story on L and Light, where it should have been to begin with. This version gives L and Light a final confrontation that they’re denied in the anime, with L discovering for sure that Light is Kira, shortly before being killed via the Death Note. After L dies, Ryuk complains that his life will be boring now that Light has no one to challenge him, so the demon takes his own personal Death Note out and writes Light’s name, while the latter begs for his own life.

It’s an undoubtedly bleak ending, but a perfectly ironic way to expose Light’s hubris in his moment of victory. Exactly when he’s decided that he’s now a god on Earth, something truly supernatural decides to remind him where his power came from, ending him in a snap. It’s a choice that cuts through all the cleverness and plotting of the story so far, a reminder that at the end of the day, no matter how clever any of the characters are, they’re still only human. At the same time, it lets Ryuk voice out loud what fans and viewers have already surmised, there’s no story without both L and Light. A version of this story where they’re not facing off isn’t one 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. Thankfully you can listen to the concept album recording on YouTube, and if you stop the anime at episode 15, you can just imagine the better ending. Because what’s more Death Note than killing something a little early in service of the greater good?