The Martin Musicals: "Smash" & "Boop!"

Bob Martin burst onto the Broadway scene back in 2006 with The Drowsy Chaperone, a loving send-up of Broadway musicals that ran for 674 performances, was nominated for 13 Tony awards and won five of them including Best Book of a Musical, which Martin shared with his co-writer Don McKellar. He followed that up by collaborating with Thomas Meehan on the musical adaptation of the movie "Elf". That one only ran for 74 performances but it has since become a Christmas staple. Next Martin collaborated on the book for The Prom, whose relatively short yearlong run belies the true depth of affection that theater folks have for this tale of a group of self-involved performers who put aside their narcissism to help a young lesbian who wants to take a girl to her high school dance. 

So it makes perfect sense to me that producers wanting a big, flashy feel-good musical should turn to Bob Martin. And this season two shows, both of them opening over the past week, did exactly that. The book for Smash, an adaptation of the TV show about the making of a musical, was co-written by Martin and Rick Elice, who, having written Jersey Boys, is no slouch himself. And Martin flew solo with the book for Boop!, a modern-day fantasia about the cartoon character Betty Boop (click here to read a piece about how he managed working on both). 

The strengths and weaknesses of the two shows are the same: Martin’s love for the old-fashioned musicals of yesteryear is evident in everything he does but he seems far better at parodying those old shows than he is at coming up with fresh ideas for new ones.

The underlying storyline for Smash remains the same as it was on TV: a group of theater people try to create a bio-musical about Marilyn Monroe called “Bombshell”. The series, which itself stumbled through only two seasons, had lots of subplots but its central question was whether Monroe should be played by a veteran performer who worked her way up through the ranks or a fresh-faced newcomer—and how far each would go to win the role. 

Martin and Elice's stage musical has done away with the subplots. And they’ve thrown out the central question too. Instead, they’ve replaced them with a dim sum menu of well-worn backstage tropes: the gay director with an eye for cute chorus boys, the drunk writer who can’t hold his liquor, the overweight stage manager who once dreamed of being onstage, the imperious star who has pretensions of being a method actress. 

But because they don’t want to insult anyone who is gay, has a drinking problem, has a weight problem or is an asshole, they go out of their way to give each of these characters a scene in which they get to redeem themselves. And no matter how well intentioned, that performative earnestness saps the humor. 

Old comic hands like Brooks Ashmanskas as the director and Kristine Nielsen as a vampirish drama coach are capable of pulling laughs out of thin air. But too many supposedly funny bits fall flat, leaving other talented folks like Krysta Rodriguez, John Behlmann and Caroline Bowman adrift.

Stage vet Robyn Hurder is supposed to be the star of the show (click here to read about her) and she belts her heart out but she lacks leading lady “ris” and having to share the show’s signature song “Let Me Be Your Star” with two other actresses (it’s reprised over and over and over again) doesn’t help.  

As they did for the TV show, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman supply the score and their songs are serviceably tuneful. But Martin, Elice and their director, the usually resourceful Susan Stroman, haven’t figured out how to smoothly integrate them into the plot. Although that may be because there really isn’t one.

The best scenes in the show may be the two video montages put together by S. Katy Tucker to make fun of Reddit and TikTok influencers. They made me laugh but they also made me wonder if a show, particularly a wobbly one like this one, can afford to piss off a group that is becoming increasingly, well, influential when it comes to getting butts in seats.

Martin fares better with Boop!  But only slightly. Appearing for the first time in 1930, Betty Boop had big eyes, long lashes and pouty lips pasted onto a big head. And unlike so many cartoon heroines who were thin and had long blonde locks, Betty’s hair was dark and bobbed and she had a curvy body outfitted in a tight Jazz Age-mini dress. Her sassy signature tag line was “Boop Oop a Doop,” 

That innocent sexiness appealed to me when her cartoons started popping up on TV in my girlhood and she appealed to lots of others too (click here to read more about that) but I wasn’t sure that Betty was remembered well enough nowadays and I was nervous about how she’d be treated on Broadway. 

Betty’s short animated features were simple. Men chased her and she hit them over the head with heavy objects to make them stop. But as with Smash, this musical version of her story is filled with lots and lots of storylines: a cartoon character discovering the real world, an orphan misfit pursuing her dream of becoming an artist, a crooked politician running for mayor, a woman realizing her full potential, three separate love stories, including a gay one and a cute puppet dog (copies of it available for sale in the lobby). 

The result is a little bit of Annie, a little bit of Back to the Future, a little bit of The Wiz and a lot of both the movie “Barbie” and Martin’s own Elf adaptation. David Foster has written the bouncy if anodyne music and Susan Birkenhead has done the lyrics, some of them clever. The show is directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, a firm believer that more is more, that kicklines are essential in musicals and that there’s no situation that can’t be helped by a confetti canon.

David Rockwell’s sets and Gregg Barnes’ costumes are thoroughly delightful. In a reverse homage to the classic 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," Betty’s cartoon life is all in black and white and then everything bursts into color when she transports to the real world of contemporary New York. In one highlight, the ensemble is dressed in costumes that are black and white on one side and candy-colored on the other, allowing them to flit back and forth between Betty's worlds just by turning around as they dance.

But what really makes this show spin is a star-is-born performance by Jasmine Amy Rogers, a 25-year-old former finalist of the Jimmy Awards and a triple threat who has a terrific singing voice, can dance up a storm and knows how to hit every comic note be it with a quip or a sly smile (click here to read more about her). The show wouldn't be even half as good as it is without her. 

The critical reviews are all over the place for both Smash and Boop!. So whether you'll find these shows to be delights or disappointments will depend on what you're looking for in a musical. As for me, I'm afraid I'll be looking elsewhere.   

 

A Farewell to—and Final Lament for—"Smash"

“Smash,” which ended its two-season run on NBC this past Sunday night, was like that friend you’re embarrassed by and are always thinking you should drop because she just doesn’t know how to behave herself. And yet, when she packs up and leaves town for good, you can’t help mourning the loss. 

 

There have already been legions of eulogies for the show (click here to read executive producer Marc Shaiman’s) and about what its failure will mean for any future shows that try to put stories about Broadway on TV. So I hesitated about adding to the pile. But “Smash” was my wayward friend too and so I’ve decided to have my little say. 
 

I had held back from sounding off about the show after my lukewarm—but hopeful—review of its pilot episode back in February, 2012 (click here to read that). I just didn’t want to join the ranks of the hate watchers who could hardly wait for an episode to end before badmouthing it.  

 

Even before the second season began with a new head producer brought in from the successful show “Gossip Girl,” new story lines aimed at a younger audience and new stars like Jeremy Jordan to play those parts, naysayers were performing autopsies on the show (click here for a detailed analysis of what went wrong with the first season). 

One week, the popular A.V. Club entertainment site gave the show an F for “The Phenomenon” episode in which the series regulars dealt with the sudden death of the character Kyle, the co-writer of “Hit List," the show’s Rent-like show-within-a-show musical. It was bad but not bad enough to deserve an F.

Even while sighing my way through some of “Smash’s" most exasperating episodes, I got a kick out of seeing familiar Broadway faces (“look, there’s casting director Bernie Telsey”) and places (“they’re sitting right next to the table we had at Bond 45”).  But at the same time, I knew that most viewers wouldn’t have a clue about any of those inside references. 

 

And I think that may have been the main problem with the show: its creative team never figured out how to please the general viewers who don’t care about Broadway or the world of New York theater while still satisfying us theater geeks who care about it too much. 

 

The standard soap-opera stuff that might have attracted a wider audience never got fully developed. Flirtations started up and quickly fizzled out. Problems popped up and were instantly resolved. When characters no longer served the shaky plot, they were just tossed aside.

Meanwhile, the process of putting together a musical that we geeks craved to see was etched in such ridiculously broad strokes that those scenes made the old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney let’s-put-on-a-show movies seem like “Frontline” documentaries.

The handwriting appeared on the wall when news leaked in March, a full six weeks before NBC officially canceled “Smash,” that Debra Messing, who portrayed one-half of the show’s main songwriting team, was doing a pilot for a CBS sitcom. 

 

Messing, of course, knows from her days on “Will & Grace” what it feels like to be in a hit series. And so her dismay with “Smash” was understandable as it jerked around her character Julia—making her a clueless writer one minute and a brilliant one the next, having her trying to adopt a baby from China while cheating on her husband.

“Smash” was originally conceived as a cable show. But its big fan Bob Greenblatt brought it with him when he moved from Showtime to head up NBC and I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to have left it behind. About 11.5 million viewers tuned in to see the first episode of "Smash;" 15 months later, only 2.4 million watched Sunday’s finale.

Shows on broadcast networks need big numbers to survive. Those on cable don’t. During its second season, “Mad Men” drew an average 2 million viewers per episode. Now in its sixth season, the show pulls in around 3 million but remains one of the most buzzed about series on TV.   

“Smash” may never have developed the cult status of “Mad Men” (only a handful of shows in the 70-year history of TV have done that) but, without the pressure to draw a mass audience, it might have had a chance to become the show that those of us who love theater could have loved.  And it’s that lost opportunity that I now mourn the most.

Why Death Came Early for "Dead Accounts"

Dead Accounts is playing its final performance tomorrow, closing three months before it had planned. I’m writing about it at this late date because I want to make the argument that the production’s high-profile Hollywood émigré Katie Holmes shouldn’t be blamed for the aborted run.  

Instead, the fault should fall fully on its playwright Theresa Rebeck. Which makes me also want to raise the question whether Rebeck's play making abilities may be less than we've thought they were. Cause let’s not mince words: Dead Accounts is a hot mess. And this isn’t the first time that description could be applied to a Rebeck project.

Over the past five years, she’s had six major productions open in New York. Three of them have been on Broadway, making Rebeck one of the few female playwrights whose work is regularly done there. But during that same period, she’s also churned out at least two novels, a steady flow of magazine pieces, op-ed articles and blog posts, plus scripts for the TV series “Canterbury’s Law” and “Smash.”

While I applaud—and maybe even envy—that kind of productivity, it can also result in work that’s shallow and desultory. Which has been the case with several of the Rebeck plays I’ve seen (click here to read my review of the previous one).  It may also explain why Rebeck has been replaced as executive producer for the second season of “Smash” which starts up again next month.

The sad thing about Dead Accounts is that Rebeck seems to have tried to go deeper.  The plot centers around Jack, a New York banker who cooks up a scheme to siphon off the money held in inactive, or dead, accounts.  He figures that since no one is using it, he might as well spend it. 

The play opens after suspicions have arisen and Jack has fled to his boyhood home in Cincinnati where his mother is struggling to cope with an ill and bedridden husband and his thirtysomething sister is trying to figure out what to do with her aimless life.

Rebeck seems to want to say something serious about American values in this second decade of the new millennium but her ADHD tendencies make it difficult for her to focus.  The play has long rants about money, religion, ice cream, trees and the superficialities of New Yorkers.

Snappy, joke-riddled dialog has always been Rebeck’s strong suit and she does get in a few zingers but she stumbles when she ventures into heavier terrain. The talk just circles around and around until it runs out of steam. 

When the lights went off signaling the end of the show, you could feel the confusion rippling through the audience at the performance my husband K and I attended. None of us could figure out what the hell had happened.

That, again, is not the fault of the cast, which, in addition to Holmes, includes stage pros Norbert Leo Butz, Josh Hamilton and Jayne Houdyshell. Under the direction of Jack O’Brien, another old Broadway hand, they all work hard. Too hard.  

Butz, in particular, summons up near-manic energy to give Jack some semblance of believability and almost pulls it off (click here for a Q&A with him). Houdyshell provides her usual emotional ballast and Holmes is fully committed to her role.  

The camaraderie the actors feel for one another is apparent onstage and off—K and I spotted them having dinner at a Broadway hangout and they looked to be totally enjoying one another.  

They've also protectively circled the wagons around Holmes, often doing group interviews to make it harder for journalists to grill her about her recent divorce from Tom Cruise (click here to read one of those group sessions).

Of course the curiosity about Holmes, making her first professional appearance since the breakup, was suppose to help draw audiences in. But audiences are often smarter than they're given credited for being. And in this case they were unwilling to shell out money just to celebrity gawk. Or to support a playwright whose bark is proving to be bigger than her ability to create work with bite. 

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Will NBC's "Smash" Go Boffo or Bust?

Does it make me a heretic to say that I’m not yet sold on “Smash”?

NBC has certainly done everything it can to push its new series about the making of a Broadway musical, including buying full page ads in The New York Times, doing social media networking up the wazoo and running a big splashy all-stars commercial right before Sunday’s Super Bowl (click here in case you missed it).

According to the Times (click here to read the piece) NBC has spent more than $25 million to persuade people that Broadway can be as cool and water-cooler (or Twitter feed) hip as working in an ad agency in the ‘60s or living in an English manor house around the time of World War I. So it feels almost ungrateful to complain.

Besides, like you, I’ve only seen the pilot. It debuted on Monday night but sneak previews have been available on iTunes, Hulu and YouTube for weeks. And the job of the first episode of any TV series is to introduce the characters and establish the set-up, which “Smash” does well enough. 

Its main players include a successful writing team—Julia, who has a cranky husband, a crankier teenage son and, for some unknown reason, is thinking about adopting a baby from China; and Tom, her gay BFF—two ingénues who desperately want the starring role in Tom and Julia’s new musical about Marilyn Monroe; a brilliant but pain-in-the-ass director; and the show’s producer who is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.

Will Julia’s family adopt the baby?  Will the Broadway chorus kid (played by Broadway’s own Megan Hilty) get the part or will it go to the fresh-faced newcomer (“American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee)?  Will the producer’s vengeful husband wage financial warfare that will kill the show?  Will non-show queens in the TV audience care about any of it?

The NBC folks are clearly hoping that “Smash,” complete with fully-staged musical numbers, will catch on the way that “Glee” did.  But I don’t know about that since most of the “Smash” songs will be originals and much of “Glee’s” appeal has been that its songs are familiar ones, allowing viewers at home to get off on seeing how each one is performed—the same dynamic that has worked for ratings champ “American Idol."

Still, it’s hard to recall a series arriving with a stronger pedigree than “Smash” has. NBC’s new honcho-in-chief Robert Greenblatt brought it with him when he made the move from the cable network Showtime and has been endlessly vocal about how much he loves “Smash.” 

Hollywood heavyweight Stephen Spielberg is credited with coming up with the original idea for doing a show about Broadway and he hasn’t been shy about his feelings towards “Smash” either (click here to read a Q&A with him). 

They’ve hired Theresa Rebeck to run the series and since she’s worked on TV (writing shows like "Law & Order") and in the theater (her latest play Seminar is currently running on Broadway) it would be hard to find someone better suited for the task.  Meanwhile, the Hairspray duo of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman is writing those original songs for the show-within-a-show musical.

And in addition to some please-the-general public names like Debra Messing of “Will & Grace” fame as Julia and a sensational Anjelica Huston as the producer (click here to read a profile of her), the “Smash” cast is filled with so many theater vets (Hilty, Christian Borle, Brian D’Arcy James, Michael Cristofer, Will Chase and Wesley Taylor) that the show is almost a full-employment program for Broadway.

Maybe the problem is that my expectations were too high. But “Smash” seems unfocused to me. I want a clear central character—a Don Draper, an Earl of Grantham, a Tony Soprano—around whom all the others can pivot instead of having my attention diverted by a little from this one a little from that one before I've developed an attachment to any of them. 

And I don't want so many clichés: the wide-eyed ingénue, the lecherous director, the overly ambitious go-fer. Just one original character would have been nice to have in the mix. 

It wouldn’t have been difficult to find one. Spielberg bought the rights to the 1982 novel “Smash” by Garson Kanin, who worked on some 30 Broadway shows including directing the original Funny Girl and writing Born Yesterday and so certainly knew his way not only around backstage but how to tell a good story.  

Kanin’s “Smash” chronicles the making of a Broadway musical through the eyes of a smart young production assistant. It’s now out-of-print but it's a romp of a read and I wish Spielberg, Rebeck and the gang had held on to more than its title.

But maybe the actors will put some flesh on the bones of their TV characters and Rebeck and her writers will pull out some surprises as the series develops. 

The critics so far have been kind (click here for a round-up of their reviews) and there will be no badmouthing from the New York Post scandalmonger Michael Riedel because Rebeck was smart enough to write him into the show and ask him to play himself, which he's scheduled to do in the third episode (click here to read the back story on that). 

The first-night ratings were respectable: about 11.5 million viewers tuned in, earning the show a 4.2 rating (3.8 in the cherished 18-49 demographic), although it did slip to 3.8 (3.4)  in the second half hour. 

Meanwhile, however, not only is Playbill doing an overnight recap of the show (click here to read it) but so is The Onion’s AV Film Club (click here to read that) which is definitely cool. 

It's hard not to root for the show. As the producer Ken Davenport noted on his blog Monday, “ Imagine what a smash ‘Smash’ would mean to theatergoing and theatermaking all over this country” (click here to read his call to support the show).

So, I’m keeping my fingers crossed (and the show in my Tivo queue) because despite my reservations, I, too, would love it if "Smash" turned out to be must-see TV.