SMASH Previews — Page 8

Tonight (3/15): Katie Webber is on for Ivy and Chelle for Susan.

Updated On: 3/15/25 at 07:34 PM

Also remember - with sets being a million times more intricate these days (much more so than the Pajama Game) there is also an element of danger of putting someone onto a stage with several motorized pieces moving quickly around in all variations of light. I know of a story of someone in a Bway show who was WILLING to go on unrehearsed, with script in hand, but at the last minute everyone involved chose not to let them for fear of several trap door moments in the show.

Who is Chelsea? Or do you mean Chelle who has (I believe) gone on for Susan for every performance so far.

Very eager to hear the Katie reports from tonight. She’s a consummate professional.

ACL2006 said: "steven22 said: "Tonight (3/15):Katie Webber is on for Ivy and Chelsea for Susan."

There's also a swing on for Webber's track."


Well, yeah…should Webber still be doing her own track as well as the lead role??

Partial spoilers below

A lot of the proposals to fix the book here and on other forums would align better with the original and be more effective emotionally/dramatically.

This may prove to be a fiery hot take, but I actually thought the show worked quite well with Katie Webber. You could not tell she had only three hours of rehearsal in the role. Katie was entirely off-book, and was just absolutely terrific. But setting all that aside, I actually like the idea of a veteran actor who's put in her time but losing a bit of her shine trying something new to fend off the threat of an ingenue usurping her role. Caroline was the stronger vocal performer of the two (and so was, erm, the Act I closer), but I actually think that serves the story. So I'm curious to see what this is like with Robyn Hurder.

The book is ... forgivably bad? It's certainly funny, and refreshing compared to Boop (which I saw the other night, and which is strange because Bob Martin's behind both). But this is very much a character-driven show, and the characters are woefully underdeveloped. Who is the focal point? Is it Ivy, who seems like an afterthought in her own show? (Maybe that's the point, but then the afterthought's understudy is third fiddle.) Is it Bombshell itself (maybe?) I didn't even know Krysta Rodriguez and John Behlmann's characters were supposed to be married until about 40 minutes into the overly long Act I. Do we need to spend so much time at Sardi's? Does everyone need a plot?

My biggest gripe is about the ending, which just felt cheap and lazy. If the contrived, feel-good sing-along was meant to be a satirical snipe, they need to do a better job of setting it up.

Book sins aside, I had a good time, which is rare for me at new musicals these days. Brooks Ashmanskas is doing the Lord's work with his comedic delivery. Really, the entire cast turned what could've been tedious material into something palatable. And all the reservations I had about Caroline Bowman disappeared when I saw her smash the hell out of They Just Keep Moving the Line -- you can feel every bit of Karen's emotions in that moment.

There was also a moment earlier on in Act I where Krysta Rodriguez dropped to the floor -- couldn't tell whether that was intentional, or whether she lost her balance in a scene with John and Brooks. (Once on the floor, Krysta had to cover her mouth to keep herself from exploding in laughter.) If it wasn't intentional, both John and Brooks handled it exceptionally well -- John also dropped to the floor to mimic Krysta, and Brooks flawlessly played off that moment by delivering his next line while hovering over John's body.

The frenetic energy of putting on an understudy as a lead this early in previews really gave this performance a special quality that made the show eminently likable. I easily could've walked out of there sour about all the things the show did wrong... but it worked. It was broken, but it worked. And it was entertaining, which is all we can ask for these days.

Katie Webber was fantastic last night. I haven't seen any videos of Hurder in the role so can't make a comparison, but with only three hours of prep (as Stro explained to the audience in her pre-curtain speech), Webber was pretty much flawless. But more than that, really: it felt like a fully developed character, one that she'd been performing for months. Job very much well done.

As for the show...I highly doubt that anyone who didn't watch the series will care one iota. And so much of the wacky, convoluted BS that made us all smack our heads and scream at the TV, "That would NEVER happen!!" is present in the book. The Actors Studio plot line is so dated it has mildew, and the whole cupcake fiasco...It's a level of unsophisticated dreck that I'm shocked to see on a Broadway stage in this day and age. I guess we're supposed to think of Smash as the kind of "cotton candy" musical that Nigel is hoping Bombshell will be. But -- IMHO -- someone needs to read the room a little better. It's 2025, the world is burning. Some character should be explaining to us why we need a Marilyn Monroe musical 63 years after her death; what can her life and death teach us about the here and now? (And the creatives should be telling us why we need a musical based on a failed TV series 13 years after it stopped airing.) Someone should also explain to Martin and Elice that alcoholism stopped being funny with Foster Brooks on the Dean Martin show. (They should tell that to Drag: The Musical as well.)

Let's face it, the whole Chloe subplot is only there so that Stro can say, "See, I don't just hire stick figures. I put a plus sized woman in Smash, and I let her bring the house down at the end of Act One." I agree that combining the Karen and Chloe roles (and changing the outcome of the "who gets to play Marilyn?" debate) would have made all the difference. That would call for major reshaping and recasting (or out and out firing) at this point so I very much doubt it's going to happen.

And how incredibly weird is it that the director of Bombshell is the main character of Smash?! Not Ivy, certainly not poor Karen (a complete cipher), not the writers (if I'm not mistaken Krysta Rodriguez has one song -- which she shares), but...Nigel?! And Brooks is amazing, don't get me wrong. This is finally his moment to take on a leading role and he shines. But the shift in focus is not the kind of "look what we have up our sleeves" surprise that fans of the show were looking for. In other news, the cast is uniformly solid (Kristine Nielsen was out, but I'm sure she's good as always); as others have noted, many of the numbers are snippets rather than full songs, which is disappointing (and only one new song in the bunch); the sets and costumes are...fine, if a little cheap looking (most of the time we're in a rehearsal room or backstage, so there's not much room for opulence).

All that being said, I had a decent enough time. Got the ticket on TDF, for which I'm grateful. Bottom line: this poor man's The Producers retread is going to outrage fans of the original show, make neophytes and critics shrug, win no awards and disappear as quickly as New York, New York.

Understudies should be ready to go on without rehearsal.

Speed said: "Understudies should be ready to go on without rehearsal."


That’s just….stupid.

Kad said: "Would really love to hear how you think understudies should be ready to step into a production without ever rehearsing."

Understudies need rehearsal and that rehearsal should happen before the first performance. If producers are now going to be charging full price for previews, they need to have the entire production ready by the first preview, and that includes the understudies. Period. This whole "we're selling this like a real performance" but "you can't expect us to have everything ready yet nor should you talk about how it's not ready because that's not fair to us" is absurd.

"And how incredibly weird is it that the director of Bombshell is the main character of Smash?! Not Ivy, certainly not poor Karen (a complete cipher), not the writers (if I'm not mistaken Krysta Rodriguez has one song -- which she shares), but...Nigel?!"

I don't know why the producers felt the need to radically change the storyline from Season One. Fans of the show loved the music from "Bombshell" and enjoyed the Karen-Ivy rivalry. The things fans of the show rolled their eyes at or disliked could have easily been cut. There is no need in Broadway show for Karen BF or one of the writer's family lives for example. No problem if everything would not be identical as the TV show but storyline appears to be very different.

Thinking back to the TV pilot, what would have been wrong with the musical opening with Ivy doing "The "National Pastime" at her audition. Right after that have Karen doing "I'm Beautiful" in her audition in front of writers, producer and director. This sets up the show perfectly for the Karen/Ivy battle to come. Oh well.