So…. Smash? Is there some stigma attached to watching this show? I don’t think I’ve heard a single theater friend of mine mention it. Nobody’s alerted me to any watching parties. Sure, Backstage and Playbill offer weekly plot recaps, but that’s not the same.
But I’m unashamedly, unabashedly stuck on the series, old 42nd Street tropes and all. This despite the fact that I’m not generally a Broadway baby. Put me on a train and point me directly to the Great White Way, and somehow you’ll find me instead in a garret in the Village watching a guy doing performance art out of a shoebox.
I’d love there to be a major TV series about struggling actors where fame wasn’t such a large part of the equation. I’d love there to be more series about non-Broadway theater adventures, like Mark McKinney’s exemplary Slings & Arrows.
But Smash has plenty for “outer critics” like me.
Think Smash doesn’t apply to the regional theater? Check the credits. The show’s created and executive-produced by Theresa Rebeck, an acclaimed writer and producer of TV dramas who has never forsaken her theater roots. Long Wharf Theatre workshopped Rebeck’s Loose Knit and Sunday on the Rocks in the early ‘90s, put Abstract Expression on its mainstage in 1998 and Bad Dates in 2009. Hartford Stage also did Bad Dates (in 2005), then followed it with Rebeck’s The Scene in 2008 and had a Rebeck one-act in 2010’s Motherhood Out Loud; the theater also staged Rebeck’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Dollhouse in 2001.
Smash’s consulting producer is Michael Mayer, who’s regularly done try-outs of his Broadway-bound shows on regional stages, including Yale Rep (Triumph of Love) and nearly Long Wharf (which announced but then scuttled a pre-New York run of Spring Awakening).
The co-executive producer is Rolin Jones, Yale School of Drama alum and author of the Pulitzer-nominated Off Broadway hit The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, which had its world premiere at South Coast Rep in 2003; it was staged at Yale Rep in 2004 with the same director and some of the same cast that later did it Off Broadway.
Smash’s cast is overstuffed with familiar regional stage names. Kristen Nielsen just turned up as the director of a high school production of a musical written by Borles and Mullaly’s characters. Nielsen’s doing the same bespectacled schoolteacher stereotype that comes with the High School Musical movies, but with genuine warmth and understanding for the character; she’s on for just moments, but radiates.
One of my all-time acting heroes, Lewis Stadlen Jr., has appeared several times as a potential producer of the Marilyn musical. Stadlen spins gold out of throwaway lines like “But all your assets are in escrow!”
Doug Hughes, the former Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theatre, appeared as himself in the April 2 episode, with Angelica Huston’s producer character Eileen asking if Hughes would like to take over as director of the Marilyn musical (now titled Bombshell). Hughes was an odd casting choice, since he’s never in fact directed a Broadway musical—he’s known for doing revivals such as Born Yesterday, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Inherit the Wind and A Man for All Seasons, and for new non-musical dramas with one-word-titles: Frozen, Doubt, Mauritius, Elling. (He blended both reputations when he did the first Broadway production of David Mamet’s Oleanna in 2009.)
My favorite lead character on Smash is undoubtedly Christian Borle, whom I first saw when he played Riff in a non-Equity tour of West Side Story at New Haven’s Shubert in the late 1990s. He was back at the Shubert a season or two later, having got his Equity card, as Willard in a tour of Footloose. That got him into Footloose’s Broadway cast a few weeks before the show closed. He was in the original Broadway productions of Spamalot and Legally Blonde and played Prior Walter in the 2010 revival of Angels in America. Borle got a New York Times profile today. Having wrapped the first season of Smash, he’s starring in the Broadway transfer of Peter and the Starcatcher this week.
For those of us who know him as an acrobatic and comical singer/dancer, the pay-off of this week’s Smash episode was seeing Borle do the first big showy number he’s had since the series began. His character, the composer of Bombshell, stands in for an absent actor and nails a patter-song in the role of Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck.
Not a week goes by when Smash doesn’t have an “Oh, that’s so-and-so” moment for me—not the obvious Broadway names (Bernadette Peters appeared as the mother of central character Ivy and even sang “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”), movie stars (Uma Thurman) and daughter-of-Meryl-Streep Grace Gummer but wonderful lesser-known talents who’ve worked steadily in Connecticut and the regional theater realm for eons. I delight in the Westport Country Playhouse references and small-town theater asides.
That’s a much more comforting way to watch the show than all the sniping and factchecking I see on the Broadway-biased websites. The show delivers a deeper and grander celebration of the American theater than it’s given credit for.