Posted: 3/12/25 at 10:53pm
Sorry but... what fanbase? It's fanbase is small and, from all I've heard from friends who have seen this already, hardly gearing itself towards the fans.
Posted: 3/12/25 at 10:59pm
Bettyboy72 said: "I texted my friend who saw the show for their thoughts. Their reply, “caca.”"
Doesn’t appear that your “friend” has many thoughts available. You may want to choose what you ask him to share very judiciously.
Posted: 3/12/25 at 11:32pm
Oh boy. This was absolutely brutal. BRUTAL. 95% of the problems with this show stem from the book. That’s all there is to it.
The book that has been concocted for this show is the equivalent of a hodgepodge-y mish-mash of AI-generated fan-fiction of the TV show. The story is chaotic, over the top, and completely inane - and not even in a fun, campy, and endearing way.
The characters are not likable. At all. Poor Robyn Hurder is saddled with easily the most poorly crafted and unlikable character I have seen in any musical. Caroline Bowman fares marginally better. Brooks Ashmanskas does his usual schtick, and it is just obnoxious here.
Thank the lord for the talent of the performers, the music, and the choreography. The show is at its best when it’s showcasing the Bombshell numbers. Which of course begs the question… why not just do Bombshell?
The show is currently clocking in at three hours. I would say a good thirty (or more) minutes of books scenes can be cut. There are too many plot lines and extraneous scenes.
While I get they were attempting to go for something unique and original with this, the attempt is ultimately a giant swing with an even bigger miss.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 12:11am
Apologies to the mostly talented cast but this was a mess.
I have no idea who this show is for. It's not for fans of the show, because every trace of it has been erased from this musical. It's not for fans of musical comedies, because the characters are so paper-thin and we learn nothing about them that there's nothing to hold onto. And - as hard as it tries - it's really not that funny. It's a bunch of trite plotpoints sculpted together into what resembles a musical. But it isn't really a show - it's a zombie.
The structure of the show makes no sense. The score is made up entirely of "Bombshell" numbers - the songs ostensibly written for the Marilyn Monroe musical - from the television show, with the exception of the finale. In the TV show, the numbers had to serve multiple purposes: a song about a marriage being over, a song about your mother not loving you, a song about being made into a star, etc. These songs weren't written to be from Marilyn's POV: they existed to be extensions of Karen and Ivy and Julia and Tom and a bunch of other characters. And they could conceivably be thrown into a Marilyn Monroe musical because they were thematically linked.
In this musical, all the numbers (except the finale) are digetic and part of the literal Marilyn musical Bombshell. They don't attempt to gove anyone a book number - and with these broad, simplistic characters, we need something to grab onto! I don't know what Karen wants, not really. Even less so any of the other characters, especially Ivy. Which is bad, because Ivy is ostensibly the lead!
Not only this fatal error, but most of the numbers aren't even performed in their entirety. So for a superfan like me, I would be excited for a song I like to start, and then almost immediately notice a large internal cut. And some of the songs listed in the playbill were such short snippets they might as well have not been sung.
That's the crux of the issue with Smash. The show feels like a jukebox musical - and a poorly-written one, at that. At least in Mamma Mia!, Donna gets to sing "The Winner Takes It All" in character and it kinda makes sense. Here, actresses are interchangebly belting out a Marilyn song with no attempt to act the lyrics besides doing a cursory Marilyn accent.
The script and plot - what there is of it - are poorly thought-out and not well-executed. The tone is a mess. The plot feels like a new writer came on every scene. There are numerous poorly written scenes trying to comment on / critique wokeness? But also the show doesn't really take a stand on that issue until a generic speech midway through Act II that ends up not mattering in the slightest except to virtue signal to the audience.
There are no character arcs, no stakes, and no coherence.
Brooks Ashmanskas feels like the lead and comes across the best in the show. Robyn Hurder tries and fails to erase Megan Hilty from our minds. Krysta Rodriguez wears a scarf in every scene like the ghost of Debra Messing. Caroline Bowman and Bella Coppola deserve better. John Behlman has two songs that should be cut. Jacqueline B. Arnold does her best.
But that orchestra... and that score... Ah, I remember the allure of Smash season 1. It was camp, but it was soapy and melodramatic and infuriating and thrilling and kind of good a lot of the time. I wish any of that had made it onto the stage tonight.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 12:50am
Tuesday night I saw Boop, which had terrifically fun, energetic dance numbers connected by dumb book scenes.
Wednesday night I saw Smash, which had a lot of the great Bombshell numbers from the TV, some of them chopped up to make them shorter, connected by boring book scenes that went on so much longer. In Boop the scenes may have been dumb, but at least they were relatively short and there was always another number coming soon. In Smash the musical numbers were so spaced out by the book scenes at times it seemed like they were never going to get to another song. Having a character say that people talking too much in a musical is bad didn't feel meta; it felt like the creatives actively taunting the audience.
I actually thought Robyn Hurder did very well. She was terrific in all her musical numbers. Her acting was on point with both the nicer version of Ivy and the mean method actress version. I thought she was great.
I didn't like Caroline Bowman's take on "They Just Keep Moving Line" in the promo video they released a few days ago, but her angrier take actually works very well in context and she killed it. (There could stand to be less business and movement in the number though.) Her "Don't Forget Me" was also great. I got sick to death about hearing about Karen's damn cupcakes, which seemed to be the primary source of her personality in the first act (at least there was finally a point to them, though it felt like Chekhov's gun popping up every five minutes before the thing finally goes off). But it doesn't hurt that she's ultimately the most likeable and sympathetic character in the show, and Bowman does well with everything she's called to do. No matter how much they kept propping up the Chloe character, I was interested in more of her (something I never would have said about TV Karen). If they'd given her a bit more she could have been a Featured Actress contender.
Everything else? No.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 12:55am
I forgot that they don’t even use “Never Give All the Heart!”
That’s criminal.
Also criminal were those hideous projections.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 12:58am
Oh, boy. Heartbroken to say that this production is a stunning misfire. Painfully unfunny and unending with a cheap physical production to boot. Shaiman and Wittman’s terrific score unfortunately does not get the stage adaptation it deserved.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 1:01am
Was Kristine Nielsen still out (as she was at the first preview)?
Posted: 3/13/25 at 1:02am
Yes, according to the slip in the Playbill, Chelle Denton was on again.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 1:09am
Oh, one thing that amused me, though I couldn't tell if it was a reference to the TV show or just bad writing.
On the show, we see Megan Hilty as Ivy do an absolutely wonderful rendition of "Let's Be Bad" in the fully-staged dream studio version, only to cut to reality where Derek is unimpressed (and says she isn't good enough?).
In the musical, Hurder did a pretty stellar version of "Let's Be Bad" herself to kick off Act 2, only to transition to the creatives conferring backstage and Nigel the director saying she's doing terrible out there. Like...no, she's not. We just saw her and it was great.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 1:18am
I loved the TV series from a dozen years ago which lasted only 2 seasons due to audience apathy. I loved that score but I keep wondering who this show is directed at. Is there really an audience to keep this going in a commercial run? I’d like to hear from someone who never saw the series which pretty much excludes this chat group. Sounds like we’re all angry about the missed opportunities but will the real “Mr & Mrs. Smith” be entertained or totally perplexed? It does sound like a hot mess though which never gives me joy. 😔
Posted: 3/13/25 at 6:17am
MemorableUserName said: "In the musical, Hurder did a pretty stellar version of "Let's Be Bad" herself to kick off Act 2, only to transition to the creatives conferring backstage and Nigel the director saying she's doing terrible out there. Like...no, she's not. We just saw her and it was great."
Funny, I watched “Let’s Be Bad” and thought… “wow, I know i’d been hoping for then to be more like the show and this number is staged almost move for move from the show, but why is this so bad?” And the costumes look cheap. And Hurder’s last note was… not great.
Updated On: 3/13/25 at 06:17 AM
Posted: 3/13/25 at 6:39am
I slept on this after seeing it last night, and I think that I'm somehow even more pissed off this morning than I was last night when I left the theatre... The fact that this has been marinating for years and had the open rehearsal for development makes what I witnessed last night even more inexcusable. The show is a half baked mess at best. I just truly don't understand how THIS is what we ended up getting. It's embarrassing.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 7:21am
I feel like Bob Martin wrote one of the best musical books of all time with The Drowsy Chaperone, and hasn't really had a good book in him ever since.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 8:26am
I've always wondered if there was a point to these Telecharge surveys, especially for shows that are already open. Probably just data mining so they know what else to advertise to you. But this is the first I've actually wanted to respond to. 🤔
Posted: 3/13/25 at 8:42am
TylerJia said: "I feel like Bob Martin wrote one of the best musical books of all time with The Drowsy Chaperone, and hasn't really had a good book in him ever since."
I thought THE PROM was decent, FWIW.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 8:47am
I’ve been skeptical about this project since it was announced and only grew moreso as we’ve learned more about it, but I’m genuinely surprised at how uniformly negative response has been. I thought for sure there’d be enough there to win people over at least to thinking it was okay.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 9:34am
Aimless, joyless, garbage, missed opportunity, and the lighting sucked too. Everything else has already been said. To the awesome burly man dressed as Marilyn last night who, when he was walking out, said "Well that pissed me off": Same bro. Same.
It's almost unbelievable they brought this back again 13 years later, changed everything we loved and created more things to hate about it. Yikes.
Updated On: 3/13/25 at 09:34 AM
Posted: 3/13/25 at 10:37am
I went in not expecting much. I might be in the minority here, but I enjoyed it. Not saying it was great, but the show was a total mess and this kept the tradition alive.
and it was 10000 times better than seeing SCHMIGADOON last month.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 10:57am
Meanwhile, I will be over here watching a YouTube playlist of all of the Bombshell numbers as they were performed and fully fleshed-out and produced in the series, while imagining what could have been with a Marilyn musical that could have actually worked on Broadway.
Posted: 3/13/25 at 11:03am
After Blonde, this, and dozens of other unsuccessful attempts to tell or appropriate the Marilyn story, I'm convinced her spirit manipulates these projects into destruction. She wants to left alone. 
Posted: 3/13/25 at 11:06am
Crazy that “Marilyn: An American Fable” is still the better of the Marilyn musicals to be on Broadway.
.jpg?format=auto&width=365)
