Liza Minnelli<\/a>,<\/strong> 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, \u201cHello, darling!\u201d Her next line, delivered to Hilty, was supposed to be, \u201cWait here, I\u2019m going to powder my nose.\u201d But Minnelli was having fun ad-libbing. \u201cWait here,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m going to go baste a turkey.\u201d And then she took a break.<\/p>\nI wandered around before we went back in to finish our takes, and I didn\u2019t see her anywhere. She wasn\u2019t in her trailer. She wasn\u2019t in hair and makeup. She wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cA Love Letter From the Times,<\/em>\u201d a tender Shaiman and Wittman ballad. Liza Minnelli: always a pro in the end.<\/p>\nAs much fun<\/strong> 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.<\/em> Her detractors said she refused to collaborate, ruling like a prime-time Eva Per\u00f3n. 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\u2019d had just a few more lines, I, too, could have been an executive producer.) Characters came and went. A show modeled on Rent<\/em> became the rival to Bombshell.<\/em> The first season of Smash<\/em> was tight and true. The sec\u00ad-ond, critics complained, was rudderless and forced.<\/p>\n\u201cThe second season lacked verisimilitude,\u201d Davenport said. \u201cBut that\u2019s just my opinion.\u201d Or, as Shaiman put it, \u201cWithout wanting to get into all that, there were just too many chefs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n<\/noscript><\/picture><\/span><\/div>\nThe cast of Smash<\/em>, the new Broadway musical, gathers on the red carpet.<\/span>JASON BELL.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\nGreenblatt did all he could to protect Smash<\/em> by moving it around NBC\u2019s schedule, where it might get a lift from other programs. \u201cBut it just didn\u2019t have the same staying power,\u201d he said. \u201cWe did it and we did it really well, and I didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\nRebeck recently told me that she has no desire to relitigate the past: \u201cI wanted [Smash<\/em>] 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.\u201d<\/p>\nAbout the only<\/strong> two theater people who didn\u2019t follow the trials and travails of Smash<\/em> were Martin and Elice. \u201cI\u2019ve written a lot about the process of creating theater,\u201d Martin said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t enjoy watching depictions of it, to be perfectly honest with you. My partner loved it. I was neutral.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cI was deep into technical rehearsals for a play opening on Broadway,\u201d Elice recalled. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know what night of the week it was on. I still don\u2019t have a DVR, so if I miss it, I miss it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Martin and Elice know their way around a theater. In addition to The Drowsy Chaperone,<\/em> Martin also wrote the delightful musical The Prom<\/em> as well as Slings & Arrows,<\/em> 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<\/em> and The Lion King,<\/em> before he cowrote \u00adJersey Boys<\/em> and The Addams Family.<\/em> He also wrote The Cher Show.<\/em><\/p>\nMartin and Elice were working on another show\u2014it wasn\u2019t going well, they said\u2014when their agent called about Smash.<\/em> They thought about their own experiences writing musicals. And one thing struck them: \u201cThe show that you end up creating is not the show you intend to create,\u201d Martin said.<\/p>\n\u201cYou think you\u2019re sailing from here to there, and then the wind starts blowing and suddenly you\u2019re sailing over there, to the kitchen,\u201d Elice added, gesturing to the back of Joe Allen, where he and Martin were enjoying a beer and a martini during our interview.<\/p>\n
Without giving too much away, the premise of the stage version of Smash<\/em> is that of a Broadway team trying to put on a cotton candy version of Marilyn Monroe\u2019s life when everything goes horribly\u2014and hilariously\u2014awry. \u201cIt\u2019s a rip-roaring comedy!\u201d Elice, ever the ad man, pitched.<\/p>\nMartin, a little more subdued, said: \u201cWell, we hope. We\u2019ll see what the reviews say.\u201d Being in the theater is \u201cthe only job where you have to explain your failure to your family because it\u2019s in the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the Spielberg-approved<\/strong> reading, Greenblatt and Meron drew up a list of potential directors. At the top was Susan Stroman,<\/strong> who staged the greatest backstage Broadway musical of all time, The Producers,<\/em> which won 12 Tony Awards in 2001.<\/p>\nBut there was a glitch. Stroman directs and<\/em> choreographs all her musicals. But Greenblatt and Meron wanted to use Bergasse\u2019s choreography from the television show. Stroman, who has five Tony Awards on her shelf, agreed to a dinner with Bergasse to \u201cmake sure he\u2019s okay with me being in charge.\u201d They hit it off and, for the first time in her career, Stroman is not choreographing while also directing. But she is \u201cin charge,\u201d and Bergasse knows that, for him, the bar is high.<\/p>\nStroman also agreed to do Smash<\/em> because she loved the TV show and the way Martin and Elice adapted it for the stage. \u201cIt\u2019s not unlike The Producers,<\/em>\u201d she said, \u201cin the sense of full-on comic eccentric characters. But they have some depth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cPeople fight. People drink. People swear. People behave badly. People go off the deep end.\u201d But then, as so often happens in the theater, they pull themselves up and get on with the show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n
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,<\/strong> a veteran of 10 Broadway shows, to play the part. Hurder thought she\u2019d \u201cbombed\u201d 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 \u201ca 10-ounce filet mignon and pile of Parmesan truffle fries\u201d and then headed to the theater for a performance of the show she was in at the time, A Beautiful Noise,<\/em> a tribute to Neil Diamond.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My wife recently saw that episode. \u201cYou\u2019re a terrible actor,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":149441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2170,1792,10656,228,790],"class_list":{"0":"post-149440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity","8":"tag-broadway","9":"tag-from-the-magazine","10":"tag-smash","11":"tag-steven-spielberg","12":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}