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.   

 

Star-Struck on Broadway: "Glengarry Glen Ross," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Othello" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

As everyone knows, big name movie and TV stars have been invading Broadway this spring (click here for a rundown of who is doing what) and theatergoers are paying big bucks for the bragging rights to say that they’ve seen them (you can check out the grosses here). So the big question is whether all the hoopla and moola are worth it. I know it's been awhile since I've written here (although I have been posting mini reviews on Broadway & Me Quickies) so I'm happy to be back with some thoughts on four big star-studded shows I’ve recently seen:  

The show: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

The stars: Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk

The ticket price: $799 for the top price at the box office, but $200 average price

David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winner about a group of salesman peddling shady real estate properties has been revived on Broadway twice before with the sensational 2005 production lead by Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda deservedly winning that year’s Tony for Best Revival of a Play (plus a Tony for Schreiber) and the 2012 production with Bobby Cannavale and Al Pacino rightfully closing after just 45 performances.  

I suspect that this current production now playing at the Palace Theatre will land somewhere between those two: no awards but a longer run. The latter mainly because people want to see its stars: recent Oscar and Emmy winner Culkin and prestige TV fan favorite Odenkirk. They’re both OK, although Culkin’s eccentric interpretation of the office hotshot Ricky Roma starts off somewhat muted. In fact, the entire production is somewhat muted. 

Mamet created a group of society’s losers who know they’ve drawn the short end of the stick but are still desperate to succeed and fighting for whatever they can grasp. But director Patrick Marber has the actors in this production taking a laid-back approach as though they think that if the deals at play don’t work out, they’ll just try something else. So what we get is basically a fan-service version of the play with the actors trading on their well-worn personas instead of digging into their characters. 

Burr comes off best as the office hothead Dave Moss but that’s because the role is so similar to the angry guy he projects in his stand-up routines that Nathan Lane—who was originally slated to play the role of the office sad sack Shelley Levine now played by Odenkirk—recommended Burr for the role (click here for more on that). And Burr does bring some much needed energy every time he hits the stage but how I wish we could have seen Lane’s spin on Levine. The revival we’ve got without him is not a bad production but it’s not a great one either. 

The show: GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK

The star: George Clooney

The ticket price: $775 for the top price at the box office, but $299 average price

The politically savvy Clooney—an editorial he wrote helped push Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race—and his longtime friend and producing partner Grant Heslov scored with their 2005 film about the TV journalist Edward R. Murrow’s battle against the demagogue Joseph McCarthy who ruined thousands of lives in the 1950s with his unsubstantiated allegations that they were disloyal Americans and members of the Communist party. 

The film, anchored by a marvelously nuanced performance by David Strathairn as Murrow, earned six Oscar nominations and currently racks up a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. So I suppose it’s understandable why Clooney and Heslov wanted to mount a stage version, particularly right now when so many McCarthy-like forces are at play in today’s politics. 

But as dozens of movie-to-musical transfers have shown, you can’t just put the script for a movie onstage and expect it to work. Clooney and Heslov, who wrote both the screenplay and the Broadway script, should have brought in an experienced playwright for the latter because they haven’t figured out how to dramatize their story for the stage. 

Subplots that added texture to the film—a couple hiding their marriage because of the network’s anti-nepotism rule, an anxious journalist afraid of being blacklisted—get lost in this stage version. Meanwhile artful touches that elevated the movie—the presence of a jazz singer whose tunes literally underscore the onscreen action—seem not only superfluous but distracting onstage.

And while I get that they need to fill the huge stage of the Winter Garden Theatre, a less imposing set than the full TV studio that scenic designer Scott Pask has created might have allowed the focus to fall where it needs to be: on the people in the story.  

That’s the kind of intimate production that is director David Cromer’s specialty. But I suspect that Cromer was constricted by Clooney and Heslov’s determination to repeat so much of what they’d done onscreen 20 years ago. Which may explain why in this era of producers loving small-cast shows, this production has more than a dozen supporting players even though few of them have more to do than rush around thrusting papers and reels of film at one another.

Clooney, who played Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly in the movie has now shifted into the Murrow role. He looks great and his movie star charisma is intact but this is his Broadway debut (click here to read about that) and his stage insecurity shows, except when he delivers one of the many speeches Morrow gives throughout the play and especially when he gets to deliver them into one of the many cameras onstage, which, of course, is his comfort zone.

I also get why audiences—and some critics—are cheering this one, particularly Morrow’s final rallying cry to stand up against authoritarianism, but I streamed the Strathairn movie the day after seeing the play and had a much better time watching it.

The show: OTHELLO

The stars: Denzel Washington, Jake Gyllenhaal

The ticket price: $897 for the top price at the box office, but $379 average price

This revival of Shakespeare’s tragedy now running at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre appeals to so many demographics that it’s no surprise that it’s been at or near the top of Broadway’s leaderboard for weeks now. I mean who doesn’t want to see the Oscar and Tony-winning Washington as the noble Moor who has defended Venice and rewarded himself with a marriage to the fair Desdemona. Or to see Gyllenhaal, one of the leading actors of his generation and a specialist in portraying complex characters, as the duplicitous Iago who tricks his commanding officer Othello into believing that his new bride is cuckolding him with an officer who has gotten the promotion that Iago believes should have been his.

Race has always been a central issue in the play, with the black Othello surrounded by the white people of Venice who relish the stories about his years in slavery and who cheer his military victories against their enemies the Turks but who never fully accept him into their society. Yet for some reason, director Kenny Leon has decided to downplay all of that, in the process gutting much of Iago’s motivation with colorblind casting, including having Iago’s wife Emilia played by the black actress Kimber Elayne Sprawl.

That’s not Leon’s only mystifying choice.  He posts a sign ostentatiously announcing that the play is set “in the near future” but he never does anything with that.  He has the actors rush through many of the speeches so that not only much of the poetry is lost but so is the prose that makes clear what is happening.  Meanwhile, a playlist of Luther Vandross-style ballads for the pre-show music sets the mood for an altogether different show than the one we get. And many of the costumes by the usually terrific Didi Ayite are downright ugly. The initial white outfit Desdemona wears looks like a cheap prom dress that was the last one left on the rack.

But of course it's the players and not the play that are the thing here. Washington brings his usual swagger to the role of Othello but he didn’t make me feel the pain that the character must be experiencing as he grows to believe there is no one he can trust. And while it may not be fair, I kept imaging Paul Robeson (who famously did the role in 1943) and James Earl Jones (who I saw do it in 1982) saying the Moor's lines and Washington’s prosaic renditions just didn’t measure up to those grand ones.  

Gyllenhaal, who reportedly spent an entire year preparing for his role (click here to read more about that) acquits himself better, offering up a wily and conflicted Iago. I wish I could have seen him in a different and better conceived production.

The show: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The star: Sarah Snook

The ticket price: $497 for the top price at the box office, but $170 average price

2025 is poised to go down in theatrical history as the year when video projections came into their own with Broadway audiences dazzled by those in Redwood, Sunset Blvd., Maybe Happy Ending and McNeal. But no show uses high-tech imagery more inventively than this adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1890 cautionary tale about the titular young dandy who is so afraid of aging that he trades his soul in exchange for eternal youth so that the ravages of time—and his many misdeeds—show up on the face of a portrait he keeps hidden away while his looks remain unblemished. 

And yet, what really stands out in this production is the very human and very soulful performance of Sarah Snook, who, aided by a team of camera operators and pre-recorded and highly choreographed images of herself, plays all of the show’s 26 highly distinctive characters, who are often in heated conversation with one another. At one point seven of them sit down for dinner together and trade Wildean witticisms.

Screens pop up all over the stage of the Music Box theater to help facilitate all this stage magic (click here to read about how they do it) but Snook, the Australian-born actress best known to American audiences for her Emmy-winning performance as the scheming daughter Shiv Roy in the HBO series “Succession,” anchors it all, never leaving the stage, changing costumes, wigs and facial hair right in front of the audience, and all the while delivering the most clearly enunciated dialog I’ve heard spoken in a theater in ages. 

And through it all, Snook looks as though she’s having the time of her life, frequently cocking an eyebrow or darting a glance to invite the audience into the fun, while simultaneously reminding us that our curated Instagram feeds and TikTok video filters are a modern-day form of Dorian Gray-style vanity. She won an Olivier for her performance when the show ran in London and she should make room on her mantle for a whole slew of awards here too.

Also deserving a big shoutout is Kip Williams who adapted the story for the stage and directed the production with unbridled creativity that ranges from setting a scene in a miniature music box theater to orchestrating a panoramic chase sequence through a dense forest, none of it gratuitous, all in service to the storytelling. And so for all its use of screen technology, this is a show that truly comes alive onstage—and I was delighted to have had the chance to see it.