SMASH, the NBC drama series going behind the scenes of a fictitious Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, spawned the phrase ‘hate-watch’ when it first aired back in 2012, morphing into a cult favourite (of sorts) when it was axed after the second season – and now Smash has come full circle with a Broadway reboot now playing at the Imperial Theatre on West 45th Street, NYC.
Here’s a selection of reviews, with a special focus on how Marilyn is portrayed…
“This iteration of Smash is, in fact, even more meta than advertised: the very loosely adapted plot seems inspired by the show’s own infamously (to a certain slice of millennial pop culture nerds) troubled production … Most Broadway viewers won’t know this Russian nesting doll of showbiz drama, nor do they need to. The musical stands on its own as an entertaining, competently made and performed show on the agony and ecstasy of musical theatre – this time, with self-awareness … Like its predecessor, Smash has its bumpy moments, occasionally veering into preening sincerity when silliness works far better.”
– Adrian Horton, The Guardian
“The terrific Robyn Hurder plays Ivy Lynn, the (initially) sweet-natured Broadway star cast in a musical called Bombshell, a feel-good depiction of Monroe’s life … Soon enough, the lovable, friend-to-all Ivy takes The Method to heart, insisting on being addressed only as Marilyn and taking on all the worst personality traits of the doomed movie star … Mutiny is inevitable, and soon enough Ivy is voted out and replaced with understudy Karen (Caroline Bowman) … [and then] Chloe (Bella Coppola), a former actress with a terrific singing voice whose body size, she’s been told repeatedly, isn’t compatible with the career of a leading lady.
So now Smash has at least one too many possible Marilyns, and whatever plot or best friend versus best friend conflict the ‘real’ show has been building falls apart and doesn’t recover.
Perhaps most perplexing about Smash, though, is its weirdly cynical, ungenerous take on the Bombshell herself. For a musical, and a musical within a musical, that gives lip service to her cultural value, Smash The Musical treats Monroe as a perpetual punchline. Ivy-as-Marilyn is an inconsiderate, amphetamine guzzling faux-intellectual whose devotion to the acting craft is presented as a vainglorious affectation. This Marilyn is without even a smidge of the sweetness and vulnerability that features in even the most cliched takes on the icon. Hurder does her best with what she’s given, but we leave Smash The Musical baffled as to what all the fuss was about.”
– Greg Evans, Deadline
“Paula Strasberg has been renamed Susan Proctor and embodied to comic perfection by Kristine Nielsen. In the beatification of Marilyn Monroe, the Strasberg connection (Paula as well as Lee) is the facet that most needs to be atomised, and Smash does a brilliant job of trashing the Strasbergs’ reputation. Hurder’s performance takes a sharp pin to the Marilyn balloon … Hurder goes from ditzy and breathless to hard and monstrous. One of the real surprises of Bombshell is its skewering of the Marilyn myth, and that includes a sly send-up of the star’s suicide. I was hoping for appearances from Jack and Bobby [Kennedy.] Alas, they’re a no-show.
For Act 1, Bob Martin and Rick Elice have written a first-rate musical. The ensemble, led by Hurder and Nielsen, make it better than first-rate … The second act hinges on which actress will end up playing Marilyn on opening night. Frankly, we don’t care, because the show is loaded with many songs for each of them to sing … each is delivered as a showstopper. How many times can a show be stopped before it actually stops?”
Robert Hofler, The Wrap
“The crux of the drama now lies in, of all things, a satire of Method acting: When the songwriters suggest in passing that Ivy might check out a book on the Actors Studio to better understand Marilyn, she becomes obsessed, brings on a Svengali of an acting coach, starts taking pills, and turns from a reliable pro into a self-absorbed nightmare … The whole plotline is frankly cruel and premised around the idea that actors are idiots who shouldn’t be encouraged to think for themselves.
Smash’s moral is, as in many backstage farces, that the madness is worth it because it’s in the service of creating magic. In its musical sequences, the show does achieve flits of greasepaint thrill … In those sequences, as on TV, Smash transitions into a fantasy of a fully staged version of Bombshell, with Ivy (or Karen or Chloe) in Marilyn regalia as she navigates the studio system, and then back to a rehearsal room with characters in sweats still working through the counts of their dances. Ah, the drama, the laughter, the tears, just like pearls!
I’m a sucker for a self-referential theatrical tale. Give me an All That Jazz or a 42nd Street and I’m happy. But in the version of Smash that made it to the stage, the magic flickers out.”
– Jackson McHenry, Vulture
“Hurder is a top-notch dancer, Coppola is a vocal powerhouse, and Bowman has an impressive belt – but none come close to the magnetism and Marilyn mastery of Megan Hilty and Katherine McPhee, whose performances haunt the production … We might even think about this Smash as a jukebox musical, with a new book conceived around existing songs. Like many jukeboxes, the focus really is on the music, and some scenes exist entirely as opportunities to perform various Bombshell numbers.
In a key deviation from the original, in which Bombshell won Tony awards, here Bombshell is a flop. This gets at a core problem of adapting this material, and may explain why the creative team switched from developing Bombshell to creating Smash: as a musical, Bombshell was intentionally unformed; we only see the songs, and they are a ceaseless stream of Marilyn solos and big production numbers, which would create many logistical staging problems — not to mention the fact that most of the book was never sketched out. This Smash skirts these issues by declaring Bombshell an artistic failure, taking the easy way out; it’s a bit defeatist, and some might have rather seen Bombshell staged on its own and be given a chance to judge it ourselves.
The main advantage would have been letting the score, the show’s true highlight, shine more. It’s sometimes hard to fully enjoy and appreciate all the stunning songs in this production, especially since many are clipped, staged as rehearsals, or removed from their Bombshell context.”
– Christian Lewis, Variety
“Is it any surprise that this musical, based on the NBC drama series, is such a bizarre, loopy mess? Probably not to the fans who were glued to the two shenanigans-packed seasons of Smash—which ran between 2012 and 2013—who became used to it boomeranging from one contorted plot point to another … The show’s fanbase remained devoted at the time, and—producers of the musical are banking on—to this day; the show about the fraught genesis of one, then two competing Broadway musicals, was full of souped-up soapy twists, theatre insider jokes, and famous-person cameos. It was also great fun, and featured fizzing musical numbers in every episode … However, the laborious dud of a musical now bearing its name doesn’t seem to know what it is, and its most needless act of self-sabotage is that it screws its own fans over.
Why, for example, are there only two actual characters remaining from the show—its two leading ladies … Are we rooting for Ivy, Chloe, or Karen to play Marilyn? Who knows: the musical doesn’t make a compellingly dramatised case for any of them … Smash sputters to an unsatisfying, flat conclusion centered around the meta-aspect of all that we have observed.”
– Tim Teeman, Daily Beast
The Marilyn Report 
2 Comments
Comments are closed.