USA TODAY International Edition
NBC lands its ‘ buzziest, loudest, highest- concept thing’
ture from the network’s generic cop and lawyer shows, which have mostly tanked. “If it doesn’t work, we’re not going to fall apart. But it’s a big hope that it can land and start to turn the tide around for us. It’s the biggest, buzziest, loudest, highestconcept thing we have.”
And the most heavily marketed, with ubiquitous ads, promos in Sunday’s Super Bowl, free early downloads and last week’s gala premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s even ( perhaps premature) talk of a real Marilyn musical on Broadway.
Smash follows Julia Houston ( Debra Messing) and Tom Levitt ( Christian Borle), a songwriting duo fresh off a hit show who put plans to take a break on hold when they decide to tackle a Broadway biography of Monroe.
Quickly, two actresses are vying for the coveted part: Ivy Lynn ( Hilty), an ambitious chorus girl hungering for a lead role, and Karen Cartwright ( American Idol’s Katharine Mcphee), a naïve Iowa transplant looking for a break, who’s quickly “disgusted by the ugliness of the business, the game you have to play,” Mcphee says.
One wins the part in the second episode, but she won’t necessarily keep it as Marilyn wends its long way to Broadway.
Show exudes talent
Steven Spielberg came up with the idea for Smash while Greenblatt was entertainment president at Showtime, and the pet project followed him — minus the nudity and adult language — to NBC, where it must appeal to a much broader audience to succeed. It’s stocked with Broadway actors and executive producers, including director Michael Mayer ( Spring Awakening), producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan ( Chicago), and creator and head writer Theresa Rebeck ( Seminar).
The network switch, Meron says, forced Rebeck to “examine what this show is on a more universal level” and “make it into a bigger world, going deeper into people’s lives outside the theater.”
Original songs by the Broadway team of lyricist Scott Wittman and composer Marc Shaiman ( Hairspray) serve a dual purpose. “Marilyn is the conduit to tell the story of Smash characters, so it’s a little more layered,” Wittman says. “Success, failure, sex, power is all wrapped in her story, which is also the story of these people as they claw their way to somewhere.”
The show mixes music with soap suds and sets its sights on the entire Broadway orbit, from a scheming assistant to budding stars and their clashing egos. “It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs, but instead of having a mansion, we have a musical,” Rebeck says.
Anjelica Huston plays Eileen Rand, a producer whose recent divorce from her partner/ husband dashes a plan to stage The Sound of Music and complicates efforts to get Marilyn made. “The investors are shy about putting their money in with her. She’s finding out that things are not as easy as they look,” Huston says.
Jack Davenport plays Derek Wills, the arrogant director brought in to helm the project, who Davenport suspects is a “mild sociopath.” And Julia is trying to adopt a baby with her husband, a plan complicated when she’s reteamed with an ex- flame ( Will Chase) who plays Marilyn’s Dimaggio. ( In a reallife twist, Messing and Chase have been linked romantically.)
“There’s a lot of conflict within her, because she loves being a mom, she loves being a wife,” Messing says. “But she can’t walk away from the Marilyn idea, and she has to deal with the consequences. Weget to follow the private, personal lives of each of these characters, and that allows us and the viewers to really invest emotionally.”
Messing, best known as a star of NBC’S long- running sitcom Will & Grace, is surely invested. Starting out her career, “I intended to be in the theater, that was my goal,” she says. “Obviously it didn’t go that route for me, and so to be able to literally come full circle, to be in a TV show that’s been mostly my genre, but about musical theater in New York, it’s the greatest gift I could ever have imagined.”
Mcphee says she especially identifies with Karen, based on her experiences after Idol ( she was runner- up to Taylor Hicks in the show’s fifth season). “I know what my character goes through, feeling like you’re so right for something, but they want a star,” she says. “Or getting so close to something and you don’t get it and you don’t really know why, and it’s sometimes over the silliest thing.”
For Mcphee, “It’s been five or six years of pounding the pavement. Every actor has some sort of challenge to overcome: They’re not thin enough or tall enough or pretty enough. For me, I’d get really good feedback, but it was either I wasn’t famous enough or people didn’t want to see you because you came from a reality show.”
A note of thanks to ‘ Glee’
While distancing their show from Glee, Smash’s creators express a debt of gratitude to Fox’s high school series for “proving how wildly successful a musical can be on television, because a lot of people have done it and failed,” Rebeck says.
Smash lacks that instant youth appeal, and liberally sprinkled real- life references to Broadway fixtures and a theater critic Julia calls a “Napoleonic Nazi” may leave some viewers perplexed. “The public appears to have either a fascination or total indifference to stories about show business, and there’s never any telling which way the wind is blowing until you put it out in the world,” Davenport says.
Meron says the “rarefied” world of Broadway has been made more accessible by the prominence of Broadway touring companies that blanket the nation. And authentic insider talk is not necessarily off- putting, Messing says: “It’s peeking behind the curtain. I never studied politics, and The West Wing wasmyfavorite show for years.”
Adds Rebeck, “We all go to musical theater for a kind of communal expression of joy.”
The first season spans about nine months, but she sees a long life ahead: “There’s no question in my mind that this world can remain big and complicated the way any show would.”
In success, NBC will likely opt for a similarly shortened second season to run uninterrupted. But viewer interest all comes down to the right blend of music, dancing, drama and the authentic labor pains of putting on a show, in which career hopes are stoked and dashed and compromises made, in the run- up from workshop to out- of- town tryout to Broadway debut.
“That may sound cliché, but it’s all stuff that happens,” says Greenblatt, who tasted failure with his first stab at Broadway producing a 2009 remake of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 that starred Hilty and closed just weeks before Spielberg called with his pitch. “It’s 42nd Street: You’re going out there a chorus girl and you’re coming back a star. When was that, 1933? It still works.”
At least, that’s the dream.