B (24:58)

And.

A (24:59)

And all that tension is dropped. And then finally, when Ivy apologizes to her in her dressing room after being awful to her for the better part of two months, Carolyn Bowman's Karen is just like, it's okay, you know, we're friends. Here's your opening night present. And they move on. Which, again, we'll get to. The person who I probably have the most respect for because I think that they have the most difficult role in the show is Robin Herder. I feel like I've been very vocal on this podcast that I really like Robin Herter. I think she's a genuine triple threat. Beautiful, graceful dancer, but also can do various styles of dance. A really strong singer, considering how great she is at dancing. She has no right to be as good a singer as she is. And also a very intuitive and smart actress. And she also has careful charisma. She knows how to own a stage. I think the first time I saw Robin Herder was in Nice Work if youf Can Get It. And I remember thinking that she was so funny and sparkling. And I've continued to feel that in everything I've seen her do, even when I don't love the material she has, I've always enjoyed her. And the same is true of her in Smash. I don't love the material she has as Ivy, but I see how she's working it. And I can't rightfully say that she's good because I don't think that the material itself supports her to be good. But she's not bad. And the fact that she's not bad I think is a testament to her intelligence and her talent. Ivy is a frustrating role. She starts off as a very down to earth pragmatic and self aware person with talent and a hard work ethic. And the one note joke that they make is that Brooke Sashmanska says all actors are basically Brooks's. Nigel thinks that all actors are stupid and that you don't give them ideas, you just tell them what to do. And the show supports that theory by Krista Rodriguez. Giving her this book about Marilyn Monroe, and that's the running joke is all the time. Brooke Sashmanskas is like, this is Krista Rodriguez's fault because she gave Robin Herter a book. And of course that's what spirals everything. And from one scene to the next, Robin Herder's Ivy goes from this super collaborative, kind and supportive leading lady, this leader of her company, to being an immediate diva in the next scene with a bunch of tics and no awareness. Only for the end of Act 1 and beginning of Act 2, she starts to have awareness because whenever she's alone with Christine Nielsen's Susan Proctor, she's like, everyone is hating me. I'm creating all these problems, I should probably apologize. And they treat it that Susan Proctor is the devil on her shoulder, giving her a pill and being like, no, no, no, you're amazing, you're a star. And they're jealous. And then it takes, I guess, until opening night without like a real come to Jesus moment where Ivy just sort of snaps out of it and is like, I've been awful, this isn't worth it and I'm going to get rid of Susan. And what Robin Herder does is she tries to find the moments where Ivy is aware that she did something bad or when somebody says something to her as she's in character, as Marilyn, watching it affect her. And that is very smart because the script does not help her in any way. Her Ivy whiplashes back and forth all the time to whatever drama the show needs in that one scene for Ivy to be. That's how they write her. And Robin tries to connect the dots of figuring out this woman who has a lot of ego but also is being led astray and is sort of having this tumultuous inner monologue about her craft, but also what the show needs and if people are even liking her anymore and being aware that she's turning everybody off and nothing ever really comes at stake for her. She learns, I guess, but she sort of learns and goes back to who she once was, and everything is just sort of. Well, it all bombed. And it's really kind of Ivy's fault, but it's not totally Ivy's fault because Susan Proctor was really the villain, and we kicked her out at the very end anyway. And here we go.

B (29:24)

Billy, I beg to differ with you. How do you mean? You're the top. Yeah. You're an arrow collar. You're the. You're a Coolidge dollar. You're the nimble tread of the feet of Freddy's day.

A (29:41)

So I don't know exactly what the show is trying to do with that. And you could argue, well, it's just trying to be fun. Fine. But you also have to still be telling a story, one that can make an iota of sense. Fun is not just glitzy costumes. It's not just good music. It's not just energetic choreography. And the choreography here is very energetic. It's mostly Josh Borghese repurposing a lot of his stuff from the TV show, but shortened and trying to make it all proscenium and not just for camera and with fewer ensemble members. And there are some really awesome pictures that he makes. But I would also argue that none of the songs have any kind of build to them. They have style, and some of them do tell story, but it's all kind of frenetic, I guess, is the way I would describe it. But so with Smash, I have this feeling with Bob Martin, between this and boop, that he is really resentful of the modern musical comedy or what people are trying to do with the musical comedy, from drowsy chaperone to now including things like the prom. It feels like he's got a very old school sensibility of what comedies should be, not just what they are, but what they should be, which is joke machines. Be in light entertainment, be a good time. And he makes a lot of digs in Smash and makes a lot of them in Boop as well. He even made them in the Prom. And if we're being honest, way back in drowsy chaperone of writers being up their own butt of musical theater today, wanting to pander and preach to audiences and not just entertain them. And there is truth to that. We've talked about this before, of preaching to the choir and going for easy cheers for the sake of an audience feeling like they have done any kind of work. But also on the other end of that spectrum is a show going for easy laughs, easy applause for the sake of entertainment. And there is a middle ground there, right? You don't have to be, you know, Company. You don't have to be Evita. You can be a light musical comedy that still has integrity in terms of its characters and its story. I might be just sort of in my head about this right now because I'm, you know, about two thirds of my way through the Elaine May biography. Ms. May does not exist. And this is something that Elaine May has always been really big on in all of her work, either in the stuff that she's written herself, stuff she's directed, or stuff that she has script doctored. Elaine May, if you don't know, if you don't listen to this podcast. Anyway, Elaine May is a comedic legend in both theater and in film and tv and is one of the few women to direct studio movies during the 1970s. And she's an Oscar nominee for her screenplay for Primary Colors and for Heaven Can Wait. She wrote the Birdcage, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best American comedies of all time. She was a groundbreaking comedic duo with Mike Nichols, who would go on to be a Tony and Oscar winning director. But she also is a major script doctor. And there are a lot of movies that she basically ghost wrote that you wouldn't know because she refused to put her name on them. But like, she fixed Tootsie and she fixed reds and she fixed a whole bunch of other movies. And the thing about Elaine May, when it came to the script, she would write because she was a funny woman. And she said, like, I can write a punchline tomorrow, but I care about truth and I care about story and I care about things making sense and about what's right for a character. And this is something that actually turned Neil Simon into a better playwright as he got older and worked with Mike Nichols on Broadway and then started working with Gene Sachs in the 80s. Because Neil Simon had these plays in the 60s like Barefoot in the park and Odd Couple and Sunshine Boys that were like joke machines and haven't really landed as well in modern day. Because what Mike Nichols did as a director was he brought a lot of truth and character to those original productions. And then people would lean into the jokes in later productions and the shows would kind of flop. But as he got into things like Plaza Suite or at least the first act of Plaza Suite and then Brighton Beach Memoirs, Lost in Yonkers, he really started delving into more complicated waters of characters where the jokes came out of the situations and came out of what we knew about those characters. And you still laughed. But it also came from being invested in the story. And with Smash, for me, I was not really invested in the story. And also, let's be clear. What I am doing right now is what we all do, which is I saw a show, I didn't care for it, and I'm trying to figure out. Figure out the reasons why. So if you liked Smash, by all means you can turn off this review, or you could still listen and be like, I see what Matt's saying, but I disagree. But this is me kind of not necessarily going, here's what's objectively wrong with this show and everyone should listen to me, but more me going, I watched this show. I had a reaction. Now I am looking at the material and what I saw that gave me this reaction. Because if something works for you, even if there are flaws, you care less about the flaws because the overall effect worked for you and Smash just did not work for me. So I'm trying to figure out why. And I mentioned in my BOOP review how there were jokes in boop, but the overall story just was kind of a mess and the characters didn't really add to anything. And Betty Boop herself had no real arc. And you can say for a Betty Boop musical, who fucking cares? But by having a legitimate arc for your leading character, by having the characters be pivotal to the story, having every second count in a medium where it is economic storytelling, it's what separates you from being a Mexican Hayride of the 1940s and guys and Dolls, the show that, you know, Mexican Hay Ride, which runs for a year on Broadway, makes its money, gets decent reviews as a semi crowd pleaser, and being Guys and Dolls, which gets revived every decade, has been done all over the world and is considered, you know, a stone cold classic. And Guys and Dolls was not trying to change the world. Guys and Dolls was just trying to be musical theater entertainment. But everything about that show came from story. And so with Smash, so much doesn't come from story. A lot of the jokes come from name dropping or deep cuts or kind of a recurring joke of never liking somebody or talking about books. There's a joke about Manny Patinkin in the very little known musical the Knife. And if, you know, you know, jokes about Julie Andrews and Hugh Jackman, things like that, some of which I thought were perfectly fine, even if I didn't necessarily laugh. But the story of the musical of Smash does not. I did not find it compelling so much, just ultimately didn't matter. It didn't matter who was going to play Marilyn in the end, because the one character who was sort of a threat to Ivy, Bella Coppola's Chloe, never wanted it to begin with. And so there's just no tension there. There's nothing at stake for that. If I were to make one major change right now, it would be at the top of the show. Everyone is coming together to make this Marilyn musical, and everyone involved up until now has done musical comedy. And they realize that they have the wrong approach for a Marilyn musical. Because Brooks Ashmanskas in this production says, you know, we're going for light, we're going for entertainment. We don't want to see her dead at the end of the show. Spoiler alert. Marilyn Monroe did die, right? She died tragically young. She did not have a fantastic life. She got very famous. She was super adored. But she was a troubled woman with a troubled past and a troubled career, troubled private life. She had a lot of sorrow. And you can't make that musical comedy. You just can't. You don't have to make it revenge porn like fucking Ana de Armas is blonde. But. But you can't do what Brooks Fancas character wants because that's actually really bad taste. And Smash, the musical wants us to believe that Brooks's character was always right. And that's what it should have been from the start. And in some ways, you could argue maybe he was. Because a lot of the songs that Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman wrote for Smash lend themselves to musical comedy. A lot of the songs in Smash, the TV show, don't really lend themselves to a book musical because they were written to be standalones. They were written to both be a possible song in a possible Marilyn Monroe musical that also happened to comment on the action of that week's episode of Smash. It's all very cabaret, right? And some of them, I think, work quite well. Like let's Be Bad, I think works very well. And Let Me Be youe Star works very well. There's another one that I actually kind of liked. Oh, they have the Never Give all the Heart. And then I actually. They kind of repurposed it in the second season. I thought it worked really nicely there. But a lot of the songs are kind of more. I don't want to say simple, but they're kind of presentational. I think Mr. And Mrs. Smith is kind of very old school musical theatery. And History Is Made At Night is very old school for a story that kind of needs more depth. And that's where I think the crux of Smash could have been, of all of these great songs that they had been writing and the story that they've been coming up with. And then they're realizing as they're putting the show together, as it's being put up in the rehearsal room, that there's not a lot of depth and they kind of have to have it. And as they're all kind of figuring it out, Ivy, played by Robyn Herter, realizes that she's sort of out of her depth because she's only ever done musical comedies. But now not only is she playing this icon, Marilyn Monroe, but they're going for a much deeper version than what she originally signed up for. And she gets in her head that she needs to go. That she needs someone to help her to go further. And that's when she reaches. Reaches out to Susan Proctor. That would make sense for me. And then you could see how everything would spiral from there. You can get there even sooner with Suit by adding Susan Proctor, and then seeing how things progress from there. And it could be that at first, what Susan's giving Ivy is working. It's actually making her performance more fully rounded. She's getting positive feedback about it, which leads her to go deeper, deeper into this madness and then go even further, like alone with Susan and locking herself off from the rest of the company. And it could be that the songs that are being written just aren't getting deeper enough. That it turns out like Nigel doesn't even like this turn that they're going down anyway, but this is the turn they're going down, and everyone is just sort of not understanding what to do. And then it all culminates in the Act 1 finale of they're at the Invited Dress. And Ivy either through a standoff or through first preview nerves or something, refuses to go on stage and leaves the building and goes to her home in Connecticut. And that is when Karen is supposed to go on. And then, of course, Karen can't go on because of some other reason, and Chloe ends up going on and crushing it. And then when. When Act 2 happens and becomes the. Well, could it be Chloe? Could it be Ivy? Have Chloe be a little tempted by the idea of getting to be Marilyn, because the whole reason she went into the associate world was because she got eventually rejected from the performing world. And while she does ultimately want to be an associate, a little part of her likes the positive reinforcement of going on for Marilyn and having it go really, really well. Meanwhile, the entire time, as Nigel gets more and more hands off on the show because he doesn't like the direction it's going and he can't handle Ivy, Chloe's the one who's secretly been kind of stepping it up and shaping the show and working on scenes. There could be a whole number that Nigel can't work in rehearsals. And then Chloe ends up fixing it. And then in act two, when it becomes Chloe versus Ivy, who's it going to be? Karen wonders why was it never me who was asked? And she realizes she has to a stand up for herself, not be so hard on herself and let herself enjoy performing again. Because the thing we always see about Karen is that she's always scared, she's always nervous, she has the goods, but she's always like, oh, no, please, I don't. I don't want to ruffle any feathers. And it's like, well, girl, if you want to be considered for Marilyn, you got to ruffle some feathers. So she learns to speak her truth and ruffle some feathers. And even though maybe it doesn't make her popular in the moment, it makes her memorable. And so maybe what happens is she goes from being the understudy to being the standby or even the alternate, because it turns out that the role is just too much for one woman to do eight times a week. Which would be a great inside joke because all of us who know Smash have always said if they actually made Bombshell a musical, that score would kill any woman who tries to do it eight times a week. And then Bella Coppola's Chloe ends up going, actually, you know what? I was tempted for a second to be Marilyn. I don't want to be Marilyn. I. I want to be Brooks Ashmanskas. And ends up taking over for him because he doesn't he cannot handle the show anymore. And the show can succeed or not succeed, what have you. But there's got to be something that works in the end, because these people have been going back and forth of what could work, what couldn't work, and it could be that in the end, all the mess turned on something really fantastic. It could be, no, most of it didn't work, but there were two or three things that went well. Or it could be, this would be a fun twist, that it actually goes over well with audiences and with critics. But the team knows that it could be better and that they're a little disappointed in themselves and a little disappointed in the community for not recognizing that what they put up was only 70% of what it could be. And then sort of with that in mind, going like, well, listen, if we were able to get people to like what we did 70% of the way, let's be a more united front and do something more full assed. The second time around. Very movie of bring it on. When the Toros get second place and they're like, listen, we got second place after only a month worth of rehearsing and coming up with a new routine, next year is going to be even better. And then Ivy kind of realizing that she does actually have it within her to go deeper as an actress and go outside of her comfort zone. And she doesn't need a Susan Proctor. She just needs a team that believes in her. That is what I would have to say. But that doesn't seem to be the message that Bob Martin wants to write for Smash. He wants us to believe that musicals with any kind of musical comedies with importance are dumb and that having a message is dumb. Which makes me think that he may be resentful of the feminist messaging they sort of shove in in the third act of Boop. And that he also thinks that millennials are dumb and Gen Z is dumb and that social media is not important. It doesn't make sense. And listen, social media doesn't make sense. And social media influencers, we've talked about this before, they don't actually make any impact on any show because they are invited to go and promote the show. And so many young theater fans don't even know their theater history. They just know what's currently playing. But there are young people who genuinely love this art form and have continued to research it and learn more about it. And there is a lot of cynicism in Bob Martin's book, but it doesn't come at the benefit of a payoff. It doesn't even feel like an insider y musical to me. Some people have said that, oh, this is a musical comedy for theater insiders. It really isn't. It's more like Broadway fan fiction. Not just because all the things that make no sense in the legitimate professional world of Smash, but just because so much of it is, again, a lot of random name drops and deep cuts catering to literally every aspect of the musical theater fandom demographic from, for the Golden Age lovers, for the Stephen Sondheim lovers, for the current Gen Z lovers. And it just, it all feels scattered to me. And more importantly, I felt very disengaged with it. I wanted it to be fun, I wanted it to be a good time and it's not atrocious. I think that again, I think it's well cast, everyone's giving it their all. Again, I said I think the music is given a top notch treatment. And even I was given some, you know, people reach out to me about the design of the show, which I don't even think the design is terribly bad. I think the design is fine for what it is. They, they have to float in and out of a realistic ish rehearsal room and then sort of like a fantasy esque Broadway stage. And then when they're in the real Broadway theater and yes, when they're doing the real Bombshell on Broadway, it's a little sparse, but it's not, it's not uninventive. It's fine. I think there are moments of creativity in the design. I think there's moments of creativity in the staging. And yes, there are some moments in the book that are funny enough, I suppose. There's also a whole bit with Brooks Ashmanskas wanting to date a chorus boy in the show, but being told by the producer in act one, you can't do that, you're his superior. And Brooks says, I know, I know. It's just that I, you know, I fell in love with him, but I'm, I won't do anything. And all we know is that in the very first scene, Brooks clearly has an attraction to this young man. We don't hear anything else about it for about 50 minutes into Act 1 when the producer says, you can't date him. And Brooks says, I know. And then we don't touch on it again until Act 2, where, spoiler alert, the team decides they have to fire someone as a scapegoat so the press can think that the production of Bombshell is back on track and they fire Brooks and. And he says, fine. The first thing he does is he calls the chorus boy who he has a crush on, and he kisses him without, you know, any kind of, I want to make sure that you're into me. He just. He just grabs him and kisses him. The audience is like, woo. And then they go off stage. It's a plot line that is unnecessary. It adds nothing to anything. It doesn't even help us with Brooks's character of any kind of sides to him. He's just. It's just another thing that he does. It's another thing that this character does. It's another thing. Everything in the show is just sort of like another thing that somebody does. And it doesn't always make sense to their character. It doesn't add a different facet to their character. Notice I didn't say depth. We're not talking about digging deep necessarily, but just showing different sides to a character's personality. I was talking to someone who has guested on this podcast before, who enjoyed Smash and was talking to me about Brooks's character and about sort of when I was saying there was a bit of a been there, done that with the role and how a lot of the characters just sort of felt. One note. This person countered that, well, you know, you watch Golden Girls and you know that Blanche is going to make a joke about sleeping with men, and you know that Rose is going to make a joke about, you know, St. Olaf, and it doesn't make it any less funny. And I thought about it, and they are partially true, they're partially correct about that. But as I listened to the Golden Girls Deep Dive podcast, hosted by my friend Patrick Hines and everybody's friend Jennifer Simard, they talk about this all the time, too. How the women of Golden Girls challenged the writers to give their characters new things to do, to not just always go back to the well, of Dorothy is unattractive and sassy and that Rose is just dumb and, like, Swedish and that Blanche always likes men. Give them new things to do, put them in different situations, have them play different power dynamics in episodes. And yes, they will. Every episode, you will have, like, a moment of the norm for each of them. But also, you will see many episodes where things change, where Rose, all of a sudden, in a moment of panic, Rose is the one who commands the room and she gets everyone in line so they can, you know, get out of the pickle that they're in. Or, you know, Blanche all of a sudden is the one who actually has some insight into relationships and monogamy and gender norms sometimes. Dorothy is the one who actually is in a very hot and heavy relationship or has something really insightful to say about emotional stuff. And it doesn't betray their characters because they are reacting to things how their characters would. But you learn something new about their characters, which makes the character more interesting, but then also provides more opportunity for comedy. If they just stay the same, then everything becomes repetitive. And you have to allow a character to shift not just because that's what human beings do, but just as an opportunity for comedy. You get more of it if your character starts to shift. Right. So that's just sort of where we're at right now with this. I don't know other things about Smash, I guess to say that Tony chances. I don't see it gutting in for musical or book. I don't think the score is eligible. Right. It shouldn't be. If it is eligible, then I'm sure. Why not? That could happen. Somebody's asking me if the choreography would be eligible, considering that a lot of it is choreography that Berghese had done before. And that's ultimately what made Warren Carlisle ineligible for hello Dolly. If Berghesi is eligible, then I do think they get in for choreography if he's not. There we go. I could see costumes. I think the costumes are well done. I could see orchestrations. I think the orchestrations are well done. Performance wise. You know, I think Brooks and Robin are probably going to be deemed lead of the show. And if that's the case, I don't see Robin getting in just because leading actress is so crowded. And again, her part doesn't make a ton of sense. Brooks might. I don't personally buy it if he's deemed featured. I think he has a really good shot at getting in, but that's really it. And there's nobody else in the cast who has enough to do or a really special moment that would make them pop off and go into Featured. Because Bella Coppola only really has one major moment. And it's the end of Act 1 and she sings the loving shit out of Let Me Be youe Star. But again, her character just doesn't really exist or have much to do besides that. Yeah, I don't know. It's. We'll see. Listen, when this comes out, the reviews will be rolling out at the same time and it could be ranging anywhere from raves to pans. Who's to say? Many of the people in my row and around me were really loving it. There's a new thing that people. I've found that I don't Mean to be ageist, but it's just because of the people who are in my row. Older gay gentlemen of a certain age have started to applaud while they laugh, doing a aha. And I find it really grating. It's almost as if, like, they're trying to create applause for every joke in the same way that, you know, when people say something super empowering, somebody will clap to try to get applause going. And that happened once at Smash, and then one time somebody tried to make that happen and it failed miserably and it was kind of hilarious. But, yeah, listen, there were people around me who were genuinely loving it, and I'm not yucking their yum. But if you're asking me why I felt the way I felt, this is why I felt the way I felt. And that is all we have to say about Smash today, everybody. So please, if you do go see it, go with an open mind. Maybe you'll love it. If you were on the fence about seeing it and this made you come up with a decision. There we go. Yeah, it's. It's just. It's just that we're in a weird time right now with musical comedy. I haven't really found any in a while that I have loved. Some that have tried hard and have done fascinating, interesting things, but none that have really, kind of really gelled for me. Probably not since Book of Mormon and before then, drowsy chaperone of like a genuine musical comedy. But also like Book of Mormon is a. That is a well structured show. You may not like the comedy of it. Trey Parker and Matt Stoner are not for everybody, but it is a well structured musical. And a lot of the things that Matt Stone and Trey Parker do on south park, they always talk about the integrity of story and the integrity of character. They don't. It's part of the reason why they had a two part episode against Family Guy saying, you know, that they don't dis, they don't hate, hate Family Guy. They just think it's lazy because Family Guy is all of these jokes that cut away from the story for random gags and they're like, we hate, hate, hate random gags. We want things to be real within the world of the episode we've created. And south park has had gags before, but the gags pop off from moments in this story, and I find that there's a lot of integrity in that. So if the writers of south park are two men who say story first, and that show has had the cultural impact, it's had. I don't think that Broadway has a moral high ground to stand on and say we're just trying to be a good time. Like who cares about story? We claim that Broadway is the cornerstone of commerce and art, right? And the people who work on it are supposed to be the best of the best. We claim that art can change lives. We claim that art can move. We claim that entertainment can really help people. I don't believe in sort of shooing away criticism for the sake of. For the desire for success and for the safe space of self esteem, so to say. And we're talking about someone here, by the way, who gets read for filth all the time, whether it's in reviews or on Reddit or on Instagram. I've gotten my fair share of harsh, harsh criticism and I read it all and some of it I think that there is truth in it and I work on it and some of it I read it and I go, I don't think that actually really applies to me. And I move on. So if anyone from Smash listened to this and felt that there was no truth in anything and anything I said, then fine, move on. But if there was anything you latched onto, I hope you, I hope you remember that and talk to me, because I'm not a hater. I'm a genuine lover of theater and I just wanted to talk about what I thought worked and didn't work and what we could make better about Smash. And that's that. If you have any questions, you can join the Discord Channel in the link in the episode description. Again you can give us a nice 5 star rating or review. We will be doing more Tony predictions later this month as well as in May as we lead up to the Tonys and some Tony Awards retrospectives with some friends of the POD in May as well. And that's it for now. I'm going to have us close out with Ms. Robin Herder. I am a fan. I think she's so talented and I look forward to seeing where she goes in her career once she's finished her journey with Smash. I think that'll be a nice ride to be a part of. So yeah, that'll be it. We'll see you guys soon enough. And take it away, Robin. Bye me.

B (57:05)

Don'T forget me when you look through the heavens with someone you love.