A Broadway musical in TV clothing
Stage scene’s heavy hitters involved in series about a Marilyn Monroe musical
PASADENA, CALIF.— Can Marilyn make it on Broadway? In a sense, she already has. Most of the creators and several stars of the new NBC musical drama, Smash — debuting Monday night at 10 on NBC and CTV — have already scored major Broadway hits, from Hairspray to Wicked.
And eventually, they say, Smash’s Marilyn Monroe musical — the faux show-within-the-show around which the series’ characters and plot lines swirl — may bring them all back there, emerging from the TV screen and onto the actual Broadway stage.
But first things first. “What we are aiming to do right now is write a great television show,” insists Smashhead writer Theresa Rebeck, whose prolific output encompasses both the stage and small screen.
“It’s not like this show isn’t enough of a challenge for all of us right now,” she says. “And whatever happens in the future, who knows? Like, we could all die tomorrow or something.”
If and when they do get around to a Broadway version — and if the TV series’ first few, boffo, scorecrammed episodes are any indication — they will have more than enough material to draw on.
“Most musicals have, like, 18 to 21 songs,” says Marc Shaiman, co-author with his longtime writing and life partner Scott Wittman of the Marilyn score. “We have 15 episodes in this season. One great thing about the show that’s actually heartbreaking in real life is when you write a song for a show and it gets cut for whatever reason . . .
“But on the TV show, we can write a song that’s just great for that episode, because our songs need to be, always, even though they’re for Marilyn,” says Shaiman, a Grammy and Tony winner for Hairspray, an Emmy winner for his Billy Crystal Oscar medleys and multiple Oscar nominee for his prolific soundtrack work in film.
The verisimilitude of Smash’s Broadway setting extends to the composers’ producing partners, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, with whom they collaborated on the film version of Hairspray, shortly after the pair hit it out of the park with the movie version of Chicago.
Their background married TV and musical theatre, producing broadcast versions of Broadway’s Gypsy, Annie and The Music Man. “I honestly think that doing all these TV musicals, and then the feature-film musicals, kind of set the stage for something like Smash to occur,” says Meron. TV movie musicals “sort of dried up and did not really attract an audience,” he says. “And then, luckily, we did the Hairspray movie with these two gentlemen, which proved to be a very, very popular film. “And feature films adopted the genre once again, which led to the creation of this show.” It’s not like there’s a shortage of qualified talent to support it. “The wonderful thing about the show is that there are so many people here that come from this world to keep it very authentic,” enthuses Megan Hilty, a Broadway star herself from the original cast of Wicked. Zadan notes “that while this show is taking shape and being made, we all were also doing Broadway shows at the same time. “(Head writer) Theresa had her new play Seminar. . . . And our director, Michael Mayer, opened On a Clear Daywith Harry Connick. Neil and I had the revival of How to Succeed in Business with Dan Radcliffe. Marc and Scott had Catch Me If You Can . . .” Which closed in September, after only six months. “We didn’t do so good,” winces Wittman. Good enough, apparently, for the producer/director of the original Catch Me If You Can movie, the venerable popcorn czar Steven Spielberg, who also happens to be the executive producer of Smash. “I’m sure I’m not the first person who comes to mind when you think about Broadway musical theatre,” Spielberg allows, by satellite from Virginia, where he is shooting Lincoln with Daniel Day Lewis. “I work in a lot of genres and the truth is, I have always had this interest in theatre,” he says, “But what goes on behind all of that, before the curtain even goes up, is something that’s altogether different.
“It’s that creative process that really fascinated me, you know, the competition, the creativity, the fights, the arguments, the dreams, the egos, disappointments, the energy . . . (I knew) that would make a very, very compelling story. And I thought it would make a compelling story on a weekly basis, one that a television series could probably most effectively tell, and one that I think audiences will be able to relate to whether or not they ever had seen a Broadway show.”
Chances are they are, in fact, seeing a Broadway show, in the longest — and most entertaining — out-oftown tryout in theatre history. The Smash pilot can be previewed in advance all weekend at www.ctv.ca. Rob Salem usually writes Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays. Email: rsalem@thestar.ca; Twitter: @robsalem