Smash looks backstage on Broadway
Prime-time soap Smash blends drama and original tunes
Decades before his elaborate film productions like E.T. and Saving Pri
vate Ryan, Steven Spielberg cut his teeth as a high school stage manager in Phoenix, feeding lines to forgetful actors in Guys and Dolls and trying to keep the members of a large Briga
doon cast from turning into bumper cars.
Backstage drama provided the first adrenalin rush of his career, he said, and always struck him as good material. So much so that, a few years ago, Spielberg began shopping around a television series set on Broadway, but he met with rejection from HBO (where he made
Band of Brothers) and the broadcast networks.
“There was skepticism,” he recalled in an interview, “that viewers would care about the making of a Broadway show.”
Then he found a fellow traveller in Robert Greenblatt, then the president for entertainment at Showtime. As a teenager Greenblatt had been a props assistant in Illinois community theatre. In 2009 he achieved his dream of producing a Broadway musical, 9 to 5, while juggling his job at Showtime.
The musical was a flop, closing after five months, but disappointment soon turned to deliverance. Embracing Spielberg’s idea, Greenblatt had a second chance to prove that he could draw a big audience to Broadway, even if it was on television.
The result is Smash, a prime-time soap starring Debra Messing (an Emmy winner for Will & Grace who has performed off-broadway) as the lyricist of a new musical about Marilyn Monroe, Anjelica Huston as a producer, and scores of theatre ac- tors playing, well, themselves. What began as a pitch for a dark-themed Showtime series has become a PGrated show beginning Monday on NBC, where Greenblatt is now chairman of its entertainment division.
Smash carries huge stakes for both NBC and Greenblatt. “We’re in a pretty bad situation,” he said of NBC’S last place among the networks. “We desperately need something to catch fire, and we hope this is it.”
For Broadway, nothing less than pride is on the line.
For years amateur singers on reality shows, and more recently the high school choir characters on the Fox series Glee, have passed for musical theatre talent without doing justice to the sweat, training and tears seen in audition rooms across New York.
Smash is the theatre capital’s best shot to reveal itself to the rest of North America.
Greenblatt and the Broadway veterans on the show’s creative team have emphasized authenticity above all else, transplanting their own DNA into the characters and plot lines, and even hiring real-life insiders like the producer Emanuel Azenberg and the theatre owner Jordan Roth to play themselves.
Jaime Cepero, a 26-year-old television newcomer who plays an ambitious personal assistant on Smash, said he felt that he was representing young theatre actors whose skills largely go unseen, as his once did.
“You watch American Idol,” he said, “and the judges say to someone who isn’t a good singer, ‘Well, you could still be on Broadway.’ Now we’re going to give the respect back to the Broadway community that it deserves.”
The question, to echo those who dared to say no to Spielberg, is whether viewers will care enough about the hopes and dreams, the backstabbing and “showmances,” of these Broadway babies to tune in week after week.
The producers of Smash are hoping for the next great workplace drama; their model is an earlier NBC series, The West Wing. On that show the writer Aaron Sorkin injected smart dialogue and absorbing melodrama into the hallway banter and political crises facing a fictional White House.
Smash has its own knowing touches — references to “Bernie” (the influential casting director Bernie Telsey) and “George” (the powerful theatre agent George Lane) — and humanizing storylines, particularly the competition for the role of Marilyn between two young hoofers, played by Katharine Mcphee (best known from American Idol) and Megan Hilty (who starred in Wicked and 9 to 5 on Broadway).
Smash is also about class, showing its actors working as waiters and struggling to pay bills, while Huston’s grande dame tosses drinks in the face of her cheating husband, even as she herself is trying to raise money for the Monroe musical.
Upstairs, Downstairs, the 1970s British series about servants and their masters in a London townhouse, is a touchstone for the creator and head writer of Smash, Theresa Rebeck, a frequently produced playwright (her comedy Seminar is now on Broadway).
“Instead of the mansion, we have a musical,” Rebeck said of the story architecture in the two shows.
Showtime’s plans for Smash never got far, but the cable version was conceived as an Entourage- like insider’s account of Broadway, said the producer Craig Zadan, full of edge (sex, nudity and profanity) and bitterness (hopes dashed more than realized).
The creators of Smash, while thanking Glee for opening the door to television musical, were quick to draw distinctions between the two shows.
Chiefly, the teenagers on Glee sing pop songs and show tunes; the theatre pros on Smash perform a couple of covers each episode too, but they also sing numbers that have been newly written for Monroe, Joe Dimaggio and others in the show within the show. The Broadway songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who won Tony Awards for
Hairspray, have been creating the numbers at breakneck speed for the original, two-act musical about Monroe — which Spielberg fantasizes about producing on the real Broadway if Smash is a hit.
“We’re writing a genuine musical, with all the complications that entails for the characters and for us,” said Wittman, who first proposed that the Smash musical be about Monroe, given her inherent glamour and drama and widespread recognition. “These aren’t Glee numbers, singing standards in a classroom.”
Zadan said he would be delighted if Smash drew ratings as high as Glee (in the neighbourhood of seven million viewers), but he and his partners are also hoping to copy that show’s success beyond North American viewership. Smash has deals in place with Columbia Records for a soundtrack and singles to be sold on itunes, while NBC and Dreamworks (Spielberg’s home) have already sold the show’s entire 15-episode first season to several international television broadcasters.