Great musical comedies are great mysteries, and not just because they’re so rare. They’re also mysteries in the way they operate. To succeed, they must keep far ahead of the audience, like thrillers with twists you can’t see coming. They are whodunits with songs instead of murders.
“Smash,” which opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, is more of a who’ll-do-it, and when the big song comes, it’s a killer. But the effect is the same: It’s the great musical comedy no one saw coming.
Or at least I didn’t. In 2012, I enjoyed the first season of the NBC television series, also called “Smash,” on which the musical is based. Its pilot, setting up a competition between two aspiring modern-day actresses to play Marilyn Monroe in a Broadway-bound musical, was terrific fun. But as the weeks wore on, the story becoming soapier and gloppier, the fizz fizzled out. Only the songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and the dances, by Joshua Bergasse, sparked highs.
So I wasn’t sure what to make of the announcement that the material was being retooled for Broadway as a comedy instead of a melodrama. A video of “Let Me Be Your Star,” the thrillingly emotional duet that was the high point of the pilot, left me baffled. Rearranged as a solo at the start of the new show, it sounded all wrong: too cool, too light, with a Las Vegas leer. Was the creative team, led by the director Susan Stroman, planning to fix the property by trashing the few things the series got right?
That turned out to be a brilliant feint.
The Broadway “Smash” being the kind of mystery I mentioned, I’ll try to be careful about spoilers. But there’s so much to enjoy at the Imperial that I could give away 10, and there would still be 20. In any case, I spoil nothing to say that “Smash” remains the story of a Monroe musical called “Bombshell.” But in this version the actresses are not midlevel hopefuls; rather Ivy Lynn (Robyn Hurder) is already a star, and Karen Cartwright (Caroline Bowman) her longtime understudy. They are not in competition — at first.
That changes dramatically when Ivy reads a book about Method acting. No longer content to play a “bubbly, sparkly” Monroe, she insists on giving her character more depth. Even though this is exactly what the creative team has been trying to avoid — a show that wallows in tawdry tragedy — she hires a coach from the Actors Studio, keepers of the Method flame. When this strange, forbidding coach arrives, pushing absurd ideas and amphetamines, “Bombshell” begins to crater.
And “Smash” begins to soar.
The book, by Bob Martin and Rick Elice, has already been demonstrating enormous skill in introducing the characters and tone. The scenes for members of the “Bombshell” creative team, in various combinations, are all funny but with distinctive profiles.
The married songwriters Tracy (Krysta Rodriguez) and Jerry (John Behlmann) are affectionately spiky, or the other way around, in the manner of a ’50s film comedy like “Desk Set.”
And the director, Nigel (Brooks Ashmanskas), along with his talented assistant, Chloe (Bella Coppola), run rehearsals so filled with inside theater references and gay Easter eggs that you barely notice the story assembling itself beneath them. Another thing you barely notice is the way the diegetic songs and dances are slipped in so neatly, with no gear-grinding. The characters perform because they are performers, not because they have unbearable needs to express. The effect, as befits a comedy, is much lighter.
The arrival of Susan Proctor, the Method coach, introduces a new tone entirely. As portrayed by Kristine Nielsen, looking like Igor in “Young Frankenstein” — the costumes by Alejo Vietti are a laugh track in themselves — this Black Sea succubus exerts a malign influence that deranges Ivy and then everyone else while sending “Smash” into comedy orbit.
But in “Smash,” the comedy is always pushing the plot ahead, the way songs do in conventional musicals. (Here the songs are illustrations.) Soon, Ivy, now calling herself Marilyn, and making Monroe-like diva demands, threatens to blow off the show’s first performance. That’s the who’ll-do-it: Who will perform? The series built to a similar question, but the answer here is a much better shocker. Bringing down the Act I curtain, it also creates, as good musicals must, a reason to make it rise for Act II.
I’ll leave the working out of the plot to those who wish to see “Smash” in person and to social media presences who will happily spoil it for you. (Influencers and online chatterers, or “vindictive youths” as Nigel calls them, are part of the story, taking the villain role formerly assigned to critics.) What they cannot spoil is the pleasure of the staging by Stroman, making a return to “Producers” form. It’s Nigel who says to the cast of “Bombshell,” “Pace is very important. Clip each other’s dialogue. Keep it moving.” But I wouldn’t be surprised if Stroman said it first.
Her speed keeps the plot aloft and, yes, covers some occasional thinness, in the manner of a comedy comb-over. Beowulf Boritt’s unfussy set design shifts locations just as quickly, from rehearsal studio, where the ensemble performs Bergasse’s athletic dances, to piano bar, where exhausted yet still ferociously catty production meetings collapse in alcohol-fueled acrimony. The lighting by Ken Billington is of a color and intensity you might call Stroman Bright, and whatever the sound equivalent of that is, Brian Ronan provides it. You hear everything, but your ears don’t squint.
I was especially grateful for that restraint during the songs: Shaiman’s musical style for “Smash,” recalling Monroe-era greats like Jule Styne and Harold Arlen, is best enjoyed at human scale. And Whitman’s terrific lyrics, written with Shaiman, are so filled with wordplay, sustained metaphor and clever cross-references that they demand more than most to be distinct. The show’s biggest numbers — “Let Me Be Your Star,” “Second Hand White Baby Grand” and “They Just Keep Moving the Line” — are too good and too well sung to miss. And though only one additional song was written for the musical, they all sound new in smoking arrangements (by Stephen Oremus and Shaiman) and orchestrations (by Doug Besterman) for 18 players.
But then everything in “Smash” feels new — and everyone. Nielsen’s nuttiness is featherweight, and Ashmanskas’s “I hate you but I hate myself more” shtick has never been more inventively deployed. Hurder, known as a sensational dancer and singer, makes a fine comedian as well, and so does Bowman, especially in a scene I won’t describe except to say: Beware of the cupcakes. Even the smallest roles are perfectly etched, in one case — a much-abused dresser — with barely two words to speak.
These are the marks of a production in full alignment, as if it had been to a dramaturgical chiropractor.
As the plot touches down for its perfect landing, I was surprised again by the turn of events. Not only the ones in the plot but also the ones well beyond it. “Smash” the musical is a kind of reclamation of “Smash” the series, and probably a kind of revenge as well. You won’t see the program credit for Theresa Rebeck, the series’ creator, without a microscope. For some fans, the changes may feel like a desecration.
For the rest of us, a real musical comedy is a cause for celebration; most are either too tuneless to be musicals or too dull to be comedies. The true mystery of “Smash” is how such a messy makeover produced such a sterling example of both.
Smash
At the Imperial Theater, Manhattan; smashbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
