Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Smash, adapted from the non-hit TV series of the same name, begins with a canny feint. Its opening number is a fully staged song, “Let Me Be Your Star,” from Smash’s show-within-a-show, Bombshell, a Broadway biomusical about Marilyn Monroe. Robyn Hurder—as Ivy Lynn, the actress cast as Marilyn—sounds great singing it, and she hits all her marks as she rushes through the motions of the screen star’s best-known imagery: laying handprints at Grauman's, holding a white dress as it billows up around her, cooing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. Yet something is off; the number feels corny and busy. Doubts about Smash creep in: Is this supposed to be…good? But then the show’s focus pulls back, and we are in a fluorescent-lit studio where Bombshell is being rehearsed, and Bombshell’s director, Nigel—played, in full comic bloom, by Brooks Ashmanskas—has notes. “Is the tempo too bright?” (Yes.) “Are there too many bits?” (Yes.) Does our star have time to breathe?” (Not enough.) For a moment, you feel relief: Phew! They know. But knowingness, it turns out, is not the same as knowledge, and it certainly isn't power.
Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
The TV version of Smash, which ran on NBC in 2012 and 2013, was a series that many theater fans loved to hate-watch. The same people who were grateful to see backstage-Broadway representation in mass culture at all were also highly sensitive to its potential for embarrassment, of which there was plenty. By general consensus, the best parts of the series were its elaborately staged musical numbers, written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse; the rest was ill-formed and dumbed-down dramatics. Its ratings plummeted, but the flailing chaos of Smash—mirrored by conflicts behind the scenes, some of which went public—became central to its appeal for those viewers who stuck by it. (When it switched showrunners for its second season, it lost steam not because it got worse but because it got better; not unlike the post–Julie Taymor Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, it lost its capacity to make you shake your head in disbelief.)
That poses a daunting challenge for the creators of the Broadway musical. It’s one thing to base a show on widely popular intellectual property, as is now common, but what do you do with property that didn’t sell the first time? Xanadu’s solution was to place the whole original in the forgiving quotation marks of camp. But Smash, directed by Susan Stroman (The Producers), takes a different approach. The musical is still about the making of a Marilyn show called Bombshell; it retains Shaiman and Wittman’s songs, and Bergasse returns to stage them (though with fewer dancers and on chintzier sets). Other than that, it junks all the specifics of the series. The entire plot is new, and so are all of the characters—including the two, Ivy Lynn and Karen Cartwright, who have the same names as women in the original: Ivy is now an established diva, and Karen is in Ivy’s former league as a Broadway chorine who has paid her dues.
Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
Instead of the quote marks of camp, Smash puts its source in the brackets of metatheatricality. The stories and people that book writers Rick Elice and Bob Martin have devised for this Smash are no better than their TV counterparts. The script is a bird’s-nest wig of hairpin turns, bizarre coloration and otiose extensions; the charitable interpretation is that its implausible twists are a tribute to the soapiness of the series. Except now it all has a wink of self-awareness. With one deliberate exception, none of the songs are used as heightened expressions of feeling, in the standard musical-theater way. They are all employed diegetically, which is to say as songs from Bombshell being performed in rehearsal or onstage or on a piano at a bar. That may be the show’s only choice, because the score’s pastiche facility gives it a ceiling: It is always a simulacrum of musical theater, not the thing in itself; it can be the best thing about a bad show but it can’t be the basis of a sincerely good one. (Bombshell would be a fiasco as an actual musical about Marilyn Monroe; its apotheotic form was the wonderful 2015 benefit concert of its songs at the Minskoff Theatre.)
Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
That makes it hard, if not impossible, for any of the actors to connect in an emotional way, or for us to connect to them. They’re a likable bunch: Caroline Bowman as Karen and Casey Garvin as her chorus-boy hubby, Krysta Rodriguez as Bombshell’s librettist and John Behlmann as her tippling composer and husband, Bella Coppola as the production’s associate director, Jacqueline B. Arnold as its producer and Nicholas Matos as her assistant. But of these, only Bowman and Coppola have chances to shine as musical performers. Hurder gets more opportunities to show off her tremendous abilities—she was the best Cassie I’ve ever seen in A Chorus Line—but she’s nested inside too many dolls. In the brassy ode to misbehavior “Let’s Be Bad,” for example, we get the mise en abyme of Hurder playing Ivy playing Marilyn playing Sugar in Some Like It Hot. (Adding to the referentiality: A version of this song also appeared in Shaiman and Wittman’s score for the 2022 Broadway musical based on that film.) And when Ivy isn’t performing, she is absorbed into more meta tomfoolery via her adoption of intense Method techniques under the spell of a wicked old acting guru (a madly dated figure who is nonetheless played with delicious gusto by Kristine Nielsen).
Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
“I'm confused,” says Behlmann’s fictional writer. “Is that Ivy being a monster, or is it Ivy playing Marilyn being a monster?” To which the director, Nigel, replies: “There are many layers to this particular shit-show.” To which the show’s real writers might say: Touché. Ashmanskas is Smash’s one true thing. His Nigel is like Julian Marsh—the stalwart director in another backstage musical, 42nd Street—except much, much gayer. (Marsh was gay in the novel from which 42nd Street was adapted, but that’s a story for another day.) As in The Prom, another musical about misguided show folk, Ashmanskas is not only hilariously queeny but also touchingly so. It’s a superb performance that should put him in the running for a Tony Award this year; he lights the whole production with a glorious flame.
Somehow, I enjoyed the overall experience of Smash. Aside from Ashmanshas and a few diverting numbers, the show is undeniably unmoored. But isn’t that ultimately true to the brand? This production embraces failure; it hugs its own shambles. And for diehard Smash appreciators, perhaps that—in a meta way!—is right for the material: Part of the appeal of Bombshell has always been that it had bomb written right into it. To be fair, this production isn’t really a bomb; it doesn’t go hard enough for that. It’s the shell of a bomb. “Behind every hit musical…is a hot mess,” teases one of Smash’s advertising taglines. But what’s behind a flop? Maybe it’s something like the warm mess we get here. They throw spaghetti at the wall and, when nothing sticks, they shrug and serve the spaghetti.
Smash. Imperial Theatre (Broadway). Book by Rick Elice and Bob Martin. Music by Marc Shaiman. Lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman. Directed by Susan Stroman. With Robyn Hurder, Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez, John Behlmann, Kristine Nielsen, Caroline Bowman, Jacqueline B. Arnold, Bella Coppola, Casey Garvin, Nicholas Matos, Megan Kane. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.
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Smash | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy
