Award-winning singer and actress Jennifer Hudson has joined the production team for the upcoming Broadway adaptation of TV’s Smash, Deadline reports.
“Hudson, a Grammy, Oscar, Tony, and Emmy winner, announced her participation today on her daytime talk show The Jennifer Hudson Show.
Smash is expected to arrive on Broadway in 2025. Executive producers include Steven Spielberg, Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, David Marshall Grant, and Joshua Safran.
Hudson’s participation reunites her with Smash composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and producers Robert Greenblatt and Neil Meron, the team behind NBC’s 2016 Hairspray Live!, the musical special in which she played the role of Motormouth Maybelle.
The Broadway production will be directed by five-time Tony-winning director Susan Stroman, with a score by the Tony- and Grammy- winning duo Shaiman and Wittman, who were most recently on Broadway with Some Like It Hot. Shaiman and Wittman wrote more than two dozen songs for the Smash TV show, many of which will be used in the musical (including the Emmy-nominated ‘Let Me Be Your Star’). They will also be writing new material.
Like the series created by Theresa Rebeck, the adaptation will chronicle the process of mounting Bombshell (the musical within the musical, about the life of Marilyn Monroe), but the stage version is expected to depart liberally from the series. The creative team for the musical gathered earlier this year in New York for a series of workshop presentations, following an industry reading in Fall 2023.”
Some Like It Hot: The Musical – a four-time Tony Awards winner from the same team, also boasted a celebrity producer (and Monroe superfan), singer Mariah Carey. Following its successful Broadway run, the show begins a US nationwide tour in September, with a separate production set for London’s West End next year.
The Marilyn Report 