Theatre in Review: Smash (Imperial Theatre)In one of the many arguments that make up the book of Smash, someone defines a musical as "wherein a character sings when speaking can't possibly express the emotion they are experiencing, and people in the audience cheer." He adds, "No one wants to hear people talking in a musical. It's boring!" I take exception to the latter, but I certainly agree with the definition, which forces me to conclude that Smash isn't a musical at all. Based on the notorious NBC series, which had legions of Broadway pros and fans picking it apart weekly, it is about the creative team of Bombshell, a Marilyn Monroe bio musical. And, when anyone raises their voice in song or executes a dance combination, it is in service to Bombshell. The people in Smash have to fend for themselves. This is not a new idea: The show's most obvious ancestor is Say, Darling, the 1958 romp subtitled "a comedy about a musical" (words appropriated in the advertising for Smash.) It had a complex provenance: Richard Bissell wrote a novel, The Pajama Game, which he helped turn into a musical. Then he wrote another novel, Say, Darling, a fictionalized account of The Pajama Game's Broadway journey. Then he (and several collaborators) turned Say, Darling into a play with incidental songs. Get it? Got it? Good. Say, Darling was a modest hit -- its biggest talking point was Robert Morse's wickedly accurate take on the young-and-hungry Hal Prince -- But Smash's future is harder to read. It's a strange hybrid of a show, sometimes flat-out hilarious, other times groaningly implausible, and fully packed with production numbers that are both dazzling and oddly irrelevant. For all its knowing attitude and insider quips, it often makes 42nd Street and Babes in Arms look like Frederick Wiseman documentaries. As the characters come to realize, Bombshell suffers from an identity crisis. So does Smash. For example, Bob Martin and Rick Elice's book would have you believe that Bombshell is the work of top professionals, all of whom have worked together many times before. The star, Ivy Lynn, is the soul of hard-working professionalism, a grand gal who hangs out with her understudy, Karen, on her day off. We are also asked to believe that Ivy would fall under the sway of Susan Proctor, a coach from The Actors Studio (Kristine Nielsen, draped in black, looking like the third babushka from the left in one of Doctor Zhivago's crowd scenes.) Under Susan's influence, Ivy turns into Marilyn twenty-four/seven, missing rehearsals, skipping the invited dress rehearsal, popping pills, and threatening to fire anyone who gets in her way. Furthermore, she and Susan replicate the Monroe-Paula Strasberg relationship, pausing rehearsals repeatedly for fresh line readings. As Jerry, the show's neurotic composer, notes, "Call me superstitious, but having to stop the action every few seconds so that Death can whisper into our lead actor's ear, doesn't bode well for the comedy of the piece." That Smash hangs on a cornball method-acting spoof beggars belief. It's a premise that would have seemed out-of-date back in 1960, when Lee Strasberg still preached to the faithful. And it makes Ivy look like an idiot. Worse, these leathery Broadway veterans are seen as paralyzed by this development, leading to threats of firing and a ludicrous three-way competition pitting Ivy against Karen and Chloe, the Rubenesque associate director. And while the first season of Smash, the series, ended with a wild, soap-opera twist involving a poisoned kale smoothie (filled with peanuts and given to an allergic star), the musical ups the ante with an unhinged first-act finale featuring a cupcake laced with horse laxative, thus allowing the curtain to fall on vomit and defecation gags. Despite all this, Smash has many moments of wicked amusement. put over by a sterling cast. As Nigel, the director of the increasingly wayward Bombshell, Brooks Ashmanskas is golden, whether slithering out of a restaurant banquette, struggling to keep his apoplexy under control, or snapping, "A comedy with 'depth' -- my favorite sub-genre." (He also lands a laugh -- well, with some people -- delivering a way-out-of-left-field gag about the forgotten Mandy Patinkin bomb The Knife.) Nielsen puts her mannerisms -- the pope-eyed stares, the tremulous gestures, the body language suggesting the onset of electrocution -- to good use as Susan, especially when reminiscing about a client list that includes Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, and Don Knotts. Both performers cloud our minds long enough to let us forget about the plot. Robyn Hurder applies her triple-threat skills to the role of Ivy, but she has been double-crossed by the writers, being forced to carry a character who quickly becomes insufferable. Caroline Bowman rams home Karen's numbers, and Bella Coppola gets a show-stopping moment as Chloe, but Smash never seems to care who will end up playing Marilyn. As Jerry, John Behlmann struggles to wring laughs from his character's heavy drinking ("the two most glorious words in the English language: Alka - hall"), but he partners nicely with Krysta Rodriguez as his wife, Bombshell's straight-talking librettist. Jacqueline B. Arnold is appropriately tough as Anita; Nicholas Matos bravely takes the brunt of her insults as Scott, her idiot assistant. The book has plenty of amusing lines, to be sure, and there's an uproarious sequence involving an Internet influencer named KewpieDoll. (Another, in which Chloe's candidacy sets off an online debate about body-shaming, is up to the minute. And hang on for the morning-after verdict when hundreds of twentysomething-or-younger influencers have a collective nervous breakdown because Bombshell ends with Marilyn's untimely death at 36. ("We fell in love with her, and then they killed her. WTF??") The numbers, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are laced with their well-known sass and humor, but we get them out of order and often in fragmentary fashion, leaving one with the nagging feeling that Bombshell might be a bomb. (Much of the plot turns on Nigel's seemingly doomed attempt at staging a comic, upbeat account of Monroe's life.) Indeed, having seen the 1983 musical Marilyn -- it's a prized memory -- I think I can confidently say that Bombshell is as wrongheaded as that legendary disaster. The numbers are staged with brio by Joshua Bergasse, drawing an encyclopedia of moves from Jack Cole, Bob Fosse, and Michael Bennett. Susan Stroman, who showed a nice hand with farce with POTUS a couple of seasons back, keeps everything moving at the right just-shy-of-manic speed. Beowulf Boritt has supplied a rabbit warren of rehearsal rooms plus a glittering curtain with Monroe's face constructed using crystals. Video and projection designer S. Katy Tucker rolls out a series of New York skylines, Hollywood vistas, and a shot of sun-drenched LAX airport. Alejo Vietti's costumes contrast 2025-era rehearsal outfits with fifties couture and that scandalous dress worn by Monroe for John F. Kennedy's birthday. Ken Billington's lighting supplies glamour in spades; love the upstage wall of lights that elevates some of Bombshell's power ballads. Brian Ronan's sound is punchy but legible, allowing us to enjoy Shaiman and Wittman's intricate lyrics. Still, it's kind of depressing that some of Broadway's savviest talents, examining their own territory, come up with this foolish situation comedy premise. And, despite a couple of attempts at making the songs do double-duty, the music keeps addressing the wrong set of characters. The main exception is the finale, the title tune, in which Scott urges them to ignore their scars, drop their grievances, and get to work on another show. This leads to the decision to make a musical about the travails of staging a musical about Marilyn Monroe. Gee, I wonder who would invest in that. --David Barbour 
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