Polk & Co.

Cameron Kelsall: Shortly after the musical television series Smash debuted on NBC in 2012, the brilliant Gerard Alessandrini spoofed it in his evergreen parody revue, Forbidden Broadway. “Let Me Be Your Star,” the show’s marquee number, in which two hopefuls vie for the lead role in a new show about Marilyn Monroe, instead became “Let Me Be Sub-Par.” Well, now a fantasia on the main theme of the series — the fraught development of a brand-new musical — has arrived on the Main Stem, and sub-par is an adjective to which it can only aspire. Capsule review: Smash is a bust.

David Fox: I’ll admit it. I was a fan of Smash as a TV series. In fact, I believe I watched all 15 episodes of the first season in a single day. Looking back, I can’t explain. It certainly wasn’t top-shelf television, and its theater reference points were basic rather than in-crowd, but it was fun and I stuck with it… at least through most of the second (and final) season. But the idea that was floated at the time of the show – of somehow bringing to Broadway Bombshell, the imagined Marilyn Monroe musical – seemed silly, if not downright preposterous. That, of course, did not happen. Instead, now more than a decade later, we have an amped-up but somehow drained of all charm musical that is instead a distillation/reduction of the TV show about producing said show.

Sidebar: The implication here seems to be an optimistic (to say the least) assumption that the Smash TV audience has been waiting on the edge of their seats for more than ten years for this reboot to become a reality. But really—have they? I can’t imagine. The show barely got a second season, which trickled to a pretty lame conclusion. Hasn’t everyone moved on? Who are these die-hard Smash fans, and what have they been doing since 2013? In any case, this is not Bombshell. It’s just a bomb.

CK: Others have already tried and failed to put the Monroe doctrine onstage. Anyone remember Marilyn: An American Fable? If the Bombshell whose faux-development is dramatized in the stage version of Smash is any indication, this production is destined for a similar fate. The creative forces of Bob Martin and Rick Elice (libretto), Marc Shaiman (music), and Scott Wittman (lyrics) seem to fixate on the tawdry exploits of Monroe’s short and tragic life, at the expense of her humanity. And that fate befalls Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder), the ringer actress cast in the central role, whose cheery nature in the early scenes gives way to Method-induced mania as the rehearsal process wears on. The musical’s creators dispense with the TV show’s plot device of two hopefuls inching toward their big break, choosing instead to introduce an established star who loses her tether on reality. It doesn’t work at all, and it often feels hostile and misogynistic as Ivy devolves into her delusions.

DF: Tawdry it certainly is, and as you say what little we – the Smash–on–Broadway audience – can discern of the embedded Bombshell musical scarcely makes sense. There are allusions to aspects of Monroe’s career, including her early relationship to Paula Strasberg, for a time her acting coach. But as presented here in a grotesque, get-the-hook caricature by Kristine Nielsen (one of a couple of egregiously overacted performances by talented people who should be far better), she seems to be coaching not Marilyn, but Ivy-as-Marilyn. (Or at least, that’s what I think she’s doing. But it’s not like any of this is coherent.)

CK: As conceived on television, Ivy Lynn was a stalwart chorine who viewed Bombshell as her best chance at a long-deferred big break. Her chief rival, Karen Cartwright, was the classic fresh-off-the-bus ingénue in waiting. There was genuine pathos in this dynamic. Here, Karen (played by Caroline Bowman) remains a character – but is now Ivy’s long-standing understudy, who becomes an appealing prospect to the producers once Ivy goes off the rails. This moves the plot into All About Eve territory. Along the way, too, a third performer – an erstwhile actress-turned-aspiring-director (Chloe, played by Bella Coppola) – implausibly becomes a contender for the leading role. It takes an already overly complicated plot in an even more convoluted direction.

Polk & Co.

DF: Cameron, as you’ve pointed out, this is far from the first time Monroe’s life has been the subject of a musical – or a film, or a television show. As far as I can recall, not one of these has ever worked, largely because Marilyn herself is truly sui generis: often imitated, never equaled. In a sense, Smash-the-TV-series worked in part because it acknowledged this… and conversely, in part because the two central actresses on the show did each have something to offer.

As Karen, Katherine McPhee was (to put it generously) a limited actress, but a fine and distinctive singer with an appealingly vulnerable quality and a discernible personality. Megan Hilty (Ivy) had more: actual star quality, something she’s demonstrating now on Broadway in Death Becomes Her. But in Smash-on-Broadway, while Hurder, Bowman, and Coppola – the three revolving Marilyn actresses – all have good-to-very good voices of the current Broadway pop-belt variety, they are otherwise completely unmemorable, forgotten the minute you leave the theater. “Let Me Be Your Standard-Issue, Generic, Infinitely-Replaceable Star” is more like it, though that would probably be a tough lyric to set to music.

CK: Nearly all of the score comes from the original series, and the best songs from the TV show remain the best songs in the musical: the wistful “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” the rousing “They Just Keep Moving the Line.” But here they seem haphazardly applied to the new scenario, so they lose both the context they had within the Bombshell musical and the initial storyline. The long, slow second Act is full of reprises that feel like padding as the plot moves toward a predictable denouement.

DF: I suppose that all of the above could be explained or justified by the ultimate punchline: Surprise! Bombshell the meta-Marilyn musical turns out to be a flop. (Yes, it’s a spoiler, but trust me, I’m doing you a favor.) At the performance we saw, the crowd laughed uproariously. But given that audiences have just spent nearly two hours – at ticket prices topping $300 for an orchestra seat on a weekend – it seems to me that the joke is on us.