My wife recently saw that episode. “You’re a terrible actor,” she said.
Thank you, darling.
And then there was Liza Minnelli, whose cameo called for her to walk along a restaurant bar, deliver a line or two, and then sing a song. I was at the bar, and when Minnelli got to me, she stroked my cheek and ad-libbed, “Hello, darling!” Her next line, delivered to Hilty, was supposed to be, “Wait here, I’m going to powder my nose.” But Minnelli was having fun ad-libbing. “Wait here,” she said. “I’m going to go baste a turkey.” And then she took a break.
I wandered around before we went back in to finish our takes, and I didn’t see her anywhere. She wasn’t in her trailer. She wasn’t in hair and makeup. She wasn’t by the craft services table. Then I happened to be poking around one of the unused sets when a cigarette pierced the darkness. And there was Minnelli, puffing away under a No Smoking sign. We both came back to the set, finished the scene, and everything turned out fine. In fact, Minnelli breaks your heart singing “A Love Letter From the Times,” a tender Shaiman and Wittman ballad. Liza Minnelli: always a pro in the end.
As much fun as it was to be on the set, trouble began brewing in the writers room. Rebeck, according to reports at the time, wanted to deepen the characters by revealing more of their troubled domestic lives. Others wanted to stick to the drama of creating a Broadway musical. Rebeck, one of the few female writers to oversee a network show back then, felt ganged up on by the mostly male producers, she wrote in an essay published in Entertainment Weekly. Her detractors said she refused to collaborate, ruling like a prime-time Eva Perón. At the end of the first season, she was let go. New writers were hired, and the number of executive producers listed in the credits exploded. (I often thought that if I’d had just a few more lines, I, too, could have been an executive producer.) Characters came and went. A show modeled on Rent became the rival to Bombshell. The first season of Smash was tight and true. The sec-ond, critics complained, was rudderless and forced.
“The second season lacked verisimilitude,” Davenport said. “But that’s just my opinion.” Or, as Shaiman put it, “Without wanting to get into all that, there were just too many chefs.”
The cast of Smash, the new Broadway musical, gathers on the red carpet.JASON BELL.
Greenblatt did all he could to protect Smash by moving it around NBC’s schedule, where it might get a lift from other programs. “But it just didn’t have the same staying power,” he said. “We did it and we did it really well, and I didn’t want to do another season if we were just going to drag out a [slow] death. It was best to end it, but it was heartbreaking.”
Rebeck recently told me that she has no desire to relitigate the past: “I wanted [Smash] to be a love letter to the theater, something that would show how special Broadway and musicals are, how deranged and fascinating and passionate theater artists can be. I am thrilled to see how many people are still in love with the world and characters I created. That show was really important to me, and still is.”
About the only two theater people who didn’t follow the trials and travails of Smash were Martin and Elice. “I’ve written a lot about the process of creating theater,” Martin said, “but I don’t enjoy watching depictions of it, to be perfectly honest with you. My partner loved it. I was neutral.”
“I was deep into technical rehearsals for a play opening on Broadway,” Elice recalled. “I didn’t even know what night of the week it was on. I still don’t have a DVR, so if I miss it, I miss it.”
Martin and Elice know their way around a theater. In addition to The Drowsy Chaperone, Martin also wrote the delightful musical The Prom as well as Slings & Arrows, a Canadian television show about a small Shakespearean festival. Elice spent nearly 20 years as a theater ad executive, designing campaigns for such shows as A Chorus Line and The Lion King, before he cowrote Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. He also wrote The Cher Show.
Martin and Elice were working on another show—it wasn’t going well, they said—when their agent called about Smash. They thought about their own experiences writing musicals. And one thing struck them: “The show that you end up creating is not the show you intend to create,” Martin said.
“You think you’re sailing from here to there, and then the wind starts blowing and suddenly you’re sailing over there, to the kitchen,” Elice added, gesturing to the back of Joe Allen, where he and Martin were enjoying a beer and a martini during our interview.
Without giving too much away, the premise of the stage version of Smash is that of a Broadway team trying to put on a cotton candy version of Marilyn Monroe’s life when everything goes horribly—and hilariously—awry. “It’s a rip-roaring comedy!” Elice, ever the ad man, pitched.
Martin, a little more subdued, said: “Well, we hope. We’ll see what the reviews say.” Being in the theater is “the only job where you have to explain your failure to your family because it’s in the paper.”
After the Spielberg-approved reading, Greenblatt and Meron drew up a list of potential directors. At the top was Susan Stroman, who staged the greatest backstage Broadway musical of all time, The Producers, which won 12 Tony Awards in 2001.
But there was a glitch. Stroman directs and choreographs all her musicals. But Greenblatt and Meron wanted to use Bergasse’s choreography from the television show. Stroman, who has five Tony Awards on her shelf, agreed to a dinner with Bergasse to “make sure he’s okay with me being in charge.” They hit it off and, for the first time in her career, Stroman is not choreographing while also directing. But she is “in charge,” and Bergasse knows that, for him, the bar is high.
Stroman also agreed to do Smash because she loved the TV show and the way Martin and Elice adapted it for the stage. “It’s not unlike The Producers,” she said, “in the sense of full-on comic eccentric characters. But they have some depth.”
A major change is that Ivy Lynn, a seasoned chorus girl in the television series, is now a Broadway star of a certain age. Stroman cast Robyn Hurder, a veteran of 10 Broadway shows, to play the part. Hurder thought she’d “bombed” her audition, ran to a bar, and drank a big martini. An hour later, her agent called. The job was hers. She downed another martini, ate “a 10-ounce filet mignon and pile of Parmesan truffle fries” and then headed to the theater for a performance of the show she was in at the time, A Beautiful Noise, a tribute to Neil Diamond.
