SMASH Previews- Page 12

[Falsettolands]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 1:53pm

I'm always baffled by the major Stroman criticism. Of all of her flops that I've seen, I wouldn't consider her direction to be worst or even second worst thing about any of those projects.

She's not great with developing new material, no. But she also can't make bad writing suddenly...good. I find her work to be rather excellent most of the time. She's had a long career with many ups and many downs. All artists do.

[Kad]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 1:57pm

I think Stroman is an excellent choreographer but merely capable director. When she's got great material and casts, the productions shine. When she doesn't, she's not really able to overcome or elevate it the way other directors may be able to. It's hard to imagine her re-imagining a show, a la Sunset Blvd, or reinvigorating a troubled one, a la Merrily. She delivers what's ordered, for good and for bad.

Updated On: 3/25/25 at 01:57 PM

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 2:02pm

Kad said: "I think Stroman is an excellent choreographer but merely capable director. When she's got great material and casts, the productions shine. When she doesn't, she's not really able to overcome or elevate it the way other directors may be able to. It's hard to imagine her re-imagining a show, a la Sunset Blvd, or reinvigorating a troubled one, a la Merrily. She delivers what's ordered, for good and for bad."

This is fair! Which makes it even more confounding that she took this director gig, without a choreography credit. But based on her track record of shows recently, her picker might be broken…

[Kad]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 2:04pm

A number of her post-Producers projects frankly just seem like attempts to replicate The Producers.

[ACL2006]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 2:05pm

I honestly thought after Crazy For You, Contact and The Producers, that Stroman would be the next great Broadway choreographer. The choreo for Young Frankenstein was average. And she hasn't had a hit since. Though it was a shame The Scottsboro Boys flopped.

[mrshowbiz90210]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 2:54pm

#generic 

[JSquared2]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 2:57pm

mrshowbiz90210 said: "#generic"

#troll

[mrshowbiz90210]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 8:42pm

JSquared2 said: "mrshowbiz90210 said: "#generic"

#troll"

#baby

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 9:12pm

The more I think about it, maybe this just needed to be the TITANIQUE equivalent of SMASH. Marla Mindelle is at least a female writer under the age of 45.

I do wonder what Jerry Mitchell or Casey Nicholaw could have wrung out of this show.

[mrshowbiz90210]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 10:11pm

ErmengardeStopSniveling said: "The more I think about it, maybe this just needed to be the TITANIQUE equivalent of SMASH. Marla Mindelle is at least a female writer under the age of 45.

I do wonder what Jerry Mitchell or Casey Nicholaw could have wrung out of this show."


Jerry Mitchell ? Go see Bopp! , sadly the same phone it in chazerai 

 

[Dolly80]

Posted: 3/25/25 at 11:28pm

ErmengardeStopSniveling said: "The more I think about it, maybe this just needed to be the TITANIQUE equivalent of SMASH. Marla Mindelle is at least a female writer under the age of 45.

I do wonder what Jerry Mitchell or Casey Nicholaw could have wrung out of this show."

They would have done just as bad a job !

[quizking101]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 1:14am

I have honestly no idea what I just saw tonight.

It has the SMASH name. It has the SMASH songs. But whatever this Frankenstein monster of hackneyed tropes, half-baked plots, and poor character development doesn’t deserve the title.

Yes, the show itself (Season 1 at least) was a soapy mess, but at some point it realized that leaning into the camp made it an enjoyable watch. This felt like trying to condense an entire season into one show and the songs used are primarily non-diegetic, making this in essence a badly written play with interspersed music. The only thing that comes out good from this are the songs we know and love. 

Bob Martin’s book was bafflingly terrible. Most characters I either felt were underused (Caroline Bowman’s Karen), questioned their existence (the social media kid), or downright terrible people (mostly everyone else). I especially took issue with Brooks Ashmanskas’ character being essentially a slightly predatory gay director going after a chorus boy. There isn’t really any room for that type of character behavior the post-Me Too era. Additionally, I know Brooks tends to play characters that are all cut from the same flamboyantly gay cloth, but most of his choices here seemed like they were recycled from his role in THE PROM. Additionally, Joshua Bergasse’s choreography is recycled from the television show more than once, which is rather lazy to me.

l don’t know why they just didn’t move forward with the straight BOMBSHELL show. This was just a bomb…

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 1:25am

I’ll push back on one thing you said and it’s about Brooks’ character being predatory. The character makes clear it was a mutual attraction and doesn’t continue with trying to date the chorus boy until the end when it’s “ok” to do so. Personally, I saw nothing wrong with how that was written (besides it just not being needed). 

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 1:30am

Bergasse borrowing some of his choreo from the TV show is the least of this show’s problems. His tv choreo was great (and won him an Emmy) and the musical numbers are where there is occasionally life in this silly, cynical show.

And they hired him for that reason. 

[LucyEth]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 1:36am

Well, at least Ivy's no longer dead at the end of the show.

[quizking101]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 6:27am

Jordan Catalano said: "I’ll push back on one thing you said and it’s about Brooks’ character being predatory. The character makes clear it was a mutual attraction and doesn’t continue with trying to date the chorus boy until the end when it’s “ok” to do so. Personally, I saw nothing wrong with how that was written (besides it just not being needed)."

This is a fair point. I concur that it was not needed. Honestly, I think I had lost the plot and disengaged to the point where this must’ve slipped my mind.

 

[DottieD'Luscia]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 8:47am

I haven't seen Smash yet, and not sure if I will.  I was thinking, could the writing from the original series be copyrighted so that they more or less had to start from scratch with the Broadway incarnation?

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 12:29pm

LucyEth said: "Well, at least Ivy's no longer dead at the end of the show."

What a perfect pull quote! 

[itsahopi]

Posted: 3/26/25 at 12:29pm

DottieD'Luscia said: "I haven't seen Smash yet, and not sure if I will. I was thinking, could the writing from the original series be copyrighted so that they more or less had to start from scratch with the Broadway incarnation?"

Studios/producers own the copyright and those producers are producing the Broadway production. 

[MezzA101]

Posted: 3/28/25 at 2:51pm

'Smash,' a Broadway show about a show on Broadway, is 'very meta' and all too real

 

https://www.northjersey.com/story/entertainment/theater/2025/03/28/broadway-smash-musical-brooks-ashmanskas/82500491007/

[bwayphreak234]

Posted: 3/28/25 at 4:47pm

MezzA101 said: "'Smash,' a Broadway show about a show on Broadway, is 'very meta' and all too real

https://www.northjersey.com/story/entertainment/theater/2025/03/28/broadway-smash-musical-brooks-ashmanskas/82500491007/"

Love the part of the article that quotes Bob Martin saying, "They way I think of it, it's fan fic,"... Yeah, it certainly is fan fic. BAD fan fic, though...

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 3/29/25 at 3:33pm

The more I think about this weird experiment of a musical, the more I realize that Stroman and Elice/Martin are just the wrong people for this material.

Maybe it would have fared better with Alex Timbers and a writer like Bess Wohl or Halley Feiffer, who can balence comedy and drama and real-life issues.

And probably needed some more new, character-based songs, or new lyrics to existing melodies from the series.

Updated On: 3/29/25 at 03:33 PM

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 3/29/25 at 4:33pm

Yeah, I think I said early on that one is the biggest problems with this is that while there’s a lot of music, there’s no songs for the characters to sing as themselves apart from “Bombshell” so we have these “new” versions of characters who are totally boring because we never learn anything about them besides the most basic of facts like “she is the understudy and she has a husband” - literally that’s all we know about this Karen. It’s just so boring. 

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 3/29/25 at 4:36pm

If you told me Marc & Scott had nothing to do with the stage adaptation, I'd believe you. It feels like a book was written and then songs were slotted in willy-nilly.

(They ARE involved, intimately, to be clear.)

[In The Jackson Heights]

Posted: 3/29/25 at 6:39pm

I may be the unicorn who loves Broadway and musical theater and who never saw the TV show.  (I was living overseas at the time.)  I had heard Let Me Be Your Star, but otherwise came into today's matinee totally fresh on the material.

 

I'm definitely in the minority in this thread, but I had a blast and really liked it!  Brooks can deliver a line like no other.  Everybody was on today and the cast is uniformly excellent.  The first act book could be tightened up a bit but I laughed a lot.  Of course it's dumb and silly, but I thought it was great fun.  And the score is wonderful.  I'm looking forward to seeing it again.