"SMASH:" Two Musicals in None

If Smash on TV was about anything at all, it was about believing, with ruthless faith, in your bad idea for a musical. The one thing that Smash on Broadway lacks is that very faith, and it sinks the show.

Making a musical out of a television show about making a musical is really just as bad an idea as a musical about Marilyn Monroe’s life, a.k.a. Bombshell, whose troubled fictional making is the focus of Smash. Bombshell’s (fictitious) creators at least believed in their bad idea and, in the end, on TV, their faith was rewarded. (Not so in this stage adaptation, interestingly, but that's another story gone bad).

The (real) creators of Smash on Broadway seem to have had no faith at all in their material. Both the Bombshell musical-within-a-musical and their new backstage musical are played at the same desperate, hyperbolic pitch. Smash on TV knowingly captured the simmering backstage melodrama of contemporary Broadway’s reality (kind of). On Broadway now, nothing about Smash feels real — the characters in both of its musicals are caricatures; exaggerated and overplayed. With constant fade-ins and fade-outs from one musical to the other, it becomes difficult to tell them apart. Smash bursts into two bad musicals at once, each fighting the other for our attention; in the end losing us twice.

There are many furious performances in Smash because the direction has flailed any sense of humanity from these poor characters; the actors flail back in a vain attempt to restore some modicum of reality to the melodrama. A relative unknown named Bella Coppola fares best, oddly enough, singing out and stopping the show in a role of mind-numbing convolution: A humble associate director (on Bombshell), who sings well enough to find herself thrust into the spotlight as a last minute Marilyn stand-in, coming back a star (at least on social media), but rejecting Broadway stardom to return voluntarily to anonymity in the rehearsal room.

Reality, for sure.

Robyn Hurder, as Marilyn and the star who plays her, can really dance and belt and she tries very hard to be something more than just schizophrenic. Brooks Ashmanskas, as her director, gives his usual over-the-top smarty pants performance that I, confess, I usually enjoy. Here, for the first time that I can remember, he’s just too much. Then again, so is his part, as written.

The production team is an all-star combine, but you’d never know it from the palpable discombobulation up there on that stage. The new score, by Smash’s original composing team, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, feels pre-digested; indistinguishable from their pre-existing Bombshell songs. The book is by Bob Martin (The Drowsy Chaperone) and Rick Elice (Jersey Boys), who can be funny and usually know better, but not here. The direction, by the legendary choreographer Susan Stroman, is as over-charged with cheap schtick as her choreography has been, at times, over the years, while the actual choreography, by the actual choreographer of Smash on television, Joshua Bergasse, is Stro’ style on steroids.

Among the many, many credited producers (try 60! — not counting couples twice) are Robert Greenblatt (yes, the former chairman of NBC Entertainment) and Steven Spielberg (yes, yes) who, together, helped bring the original Smash to the flat screen. Both will obviously survive Smash’s mis-transfer to Broadway with their careers intact. I hope that everyone involved will.