‘Smash’ Was a Cult TV Hit. Now Steven Spielberg and Friends Are Bringing It to Broadway

In May 2022, theater writers Bob Martin and Rick Elice organized an informal reading of their stage adaptation of the television series Smash. More than a decade before, Smash had debuted on NBC in a prime slot: February 6, 2012, the night after Super Bowl XLVI. The show was a handsomely produced comedy-drama about the making of a Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. It had original songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who wrote the musical Hairspray, and lavish production numbers staged by Joshua Bergasse, who would go on to win an Emmy for his work on Smash. Initial reviews were terrific, and all of Broadway was thrilled that their crazy profession, always a bit of a backwater in the entertainment industry, had inspired a network TV show.

“It was insanely ambitious and profoundly original,” Jack Davenport, one of the show’s stars, recalled. “And for people who love musical theater, it blew their socks off.”

But as Smash wore on, behind-the-scenes squabbles, jarring shifts in tone, and a thicket of subplots took their toll. The show petered out, sadly, after just two seasons.

And yet cancellation did not kill the idea of Smash. It lived on, largely on the strength of the songs, which include the soaring anthem “Let Me Be Your Star,” and a 2013 DVD release. (The series is currently streaming on Peacock.) A 2015 Broadway concert version, featuring original cast members Katharine McPhee and Megan Hilty, was a sellout. Audience members came dressed as Marilyn Monroe.

The cult of Smash was slowly taking hold.

The producers considered turning it into a Broadway musical but couldn’t figure out how to crack it. How do you telescope a sprawling weekly series into a two-hour stage musical? And the subject of that musical—the tragic life of Marilyn Monroe—is hardly the stuff of musical comedy. Would the leading lady’s eleven o’clock number be…a drug overdose? Not exactly the way to send audiences home humming tunes and tapping toes.

Besides, there had already been a Broadway musical about Monroe. It was called Marilyn: An American Fable, and it ran a scant 17 performances in 1983. The highlight—well, that may not be quite the word—was a number in which Monroe took a bubble bath while chorus boys dressed in pink plumber’s outfits cavorted around the tub. The writers (there were 10) came up with a unique ending: Monroe did not die; she reconciled with Joe DiMaggio and walked into the sunset with Norma Jean, her younger self. The musical, critic Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times, was “incoherent to the point of being loony.”

Smash as a stage show didn’t get much traction. And then Martin, who wrote and starred in The Drowsy Chaperone, and Elice, one of the creators of Jersey Boys, hit on an idea. Why not turn Smash into a backstage musical farce about putting on a Broadway show about Marilyn Monroe? Aside from the premise, the plot has very little to do with the television series, and many of the characters are redefined.

Martin and Elice wrote quickly, and were pleased with their first draft. But lines that might seem funny over a martini at Joe Allen, the Theater District restaurant where they concocted much of the show, needed to be tested by actors in a rehearsal room. And so Martin and Elice assembled a group of friends, including Krysta Rodriguez, who had appeared in the second season of Smash; Kristine Nielsen (she raises “broad comic acting…to the level of high art,” New York Times critic Charles Isherwood once wrote); and Brooks Ashmanskas, a veteran Broadway musical theater performer with first-rate comedy chops.

The tragic life of Marilyn Monroe is hardly the stuff of musical comedy. A drug overdose? It doesn’t exactly send audiences home humming tunes and tapping toes.

The reading had no director. It was just the actors, a piano, and a musical ensemble. “We were a little group of players,” said Elice. They rehearsed a few days and then brought in the heavyweights—Robert Greenblatt, the former chairman of NBC Entertainment who had green-lit Smash, and Neil Meron, one of the series’s executive producers. Meron had also produced the movie versions of Chicago and Hairspray. The third heavyweight from the television show—Steven Spielberg (no credits needed here)—was unable to attend.

The actors read and sang through the script in the morning in preparation for an afternoon presentation for Greenblatt and Meron. As they were about to break for lunch, Martin and Elice heard from Greenblatt. “Well,” he said, “it looks like Steven is going to be able to come to hear it.”

“We weren’t sure if this was a tactic,” Elice said, thinking Greenblatt was trying to raise the stakes. But it was true: Spielberg was on his way. They told the cast, “Okay, this afternoon it’s going to be Bob and Neil and…Steven Spielberg.”

The cast sat up straight. “They made sure they didn’t overeat for lunch, and they were fixing their makeup,” Elice said.

As the actors settled around the table and opened their scripts, Spielberg, with no entourage, walked into the rehearsal room “wearing his little COVID mask,” Elice recalled. He took a seat and the reading began. But it was no longer a reading. It was “a performance,” Rodriguez said. “We did what show folk do. We pulled up.”

Martin and Elice, trying to play it cool, stole the occasional glance to see how Spielberg was reacting. So, too, did the cast. What they saw was a man laughing behind his COVID mask.

When the reading was over, Spielberg pulled down his mask and said, “Oh, it’s The Band Wagon”—the classic 1953 Fred Astaire movie about a Broadway show in trouble while in tryouts out of town but salvaged in the nick of time.

With the Spielberg seal of approval, Smash, which Martin and Elice are calling “a comedy about making a musical,” is now headed to Broadway, where it will open April 10 at the Imperial Theatre.

As second acts go, this is one to watch.

There isn’t a Broadway performer who doesn’t know all the songs in The Band Wagon by heart—“By Myself,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “You and the Night and the Music,” “That’s Entertainment!”

Spielberg does too. It’s one of his favorite movies. In fact, when he, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg were creating a movie studio in 1994, Spielberg wanted to call it The Band Wagon, “but I couldn’t get my two partners to agree,” he told me. They decided on DreamWorks instead.

Spielberg has loved movie musicals since he was a kid. His favorites are those, he said, that have “fire in the choreography”: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Royal Wedding, and his top choice, Singin’ in the Rain. He reveres director Vincente Minnelli. “The way he used the camera in An American in Paris is the purest example I have seen of shooting dance. He unleashed his lens and allowed the camera to travel everywhere with the dancers.”

Spielberg did not get around to directing a movie musical until he tackled West Side Story in 2021, but there are nods to his love of musicals in previous films, most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It opens with his future wife, Kate Capshaw, playing a nightclub performer in Shanghai, singing Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” in a lavish number that could have been directed by Busby Berkeley.

Spielberg’s love of movie musicals was the inspiration for Smash. Around 2009 or so, Greenblatt got “a call out of the blue” from Spielberg, who said: “I’ve always wanted to do a television series about the making of a Broadway musical. I’d love to talk to you about that.”

Greenblatt was thrilled. As a kid in Rockford, Illinois, he was a rehearsal pianist in high school and a stage manager at the local community theater. One of his childhood friends was Joe Mantello, who would go on to direct Wicked on Broadway. Greenblatt wanted to be in the theater but drifted to Hollywood and became a successful television executive. “But I kept trying to figure out how to get musicals into the work I’m doing,” he said.

Greenblatt brought in Meron and Craig Zadan (who died in 2018) as executive producers. Both had years of experience in the New York theater before they decamped to Hollywood. In the 1970s they produced a celebrated cabaret series at the Ballroom in SoHo featuring Broadway’s reigning composers and lyricists. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who had just written Evita, were among them. Lloyd Webber was working on a show that would become Cats, and Meron and Zadan, hoping to produce it, introduced Lloyd Webber to Joe Papp, the head of the Public Theater. The composer played his score for Papp. “He fell asleep while listening to it,” Meron recalled.

According to Meron, Spielberg’s initial concept was to do an original television musical every season and then produce it on Broadway. Since it takes, on average, about eight years to produce one musical, the plan was “somewhat unrealistic but very ambitious,” Meron said. One thing Spielberg insisted on, however: All the songs had to be original to the series. No interpolations of classic show tunes or pop songs, as there were in Glee, the Fox show popular at the time about high school glee club kids. “Let’s really be ambitious and try to create as much new music and lyrics as we can,” Spielberg told Greenblatt.

Greenblatt and Meron immediately thought of Shaiman and Wittman, two of the fastest (and funniest) songwriters in the business. And they had something in common with Spielberg: They, too, love The Band Wagon. “I always had a dream that I would do a one-man show about Oscar Levant,” Shaiman said, referring to the curmudgeonly actor, author, real-life composer, and one of the stars of the movie. “Instead, I just grew up to be him.” Shaiman admits to being a pessimist, prone to Levantine moodiness. Wittman can be as bubbly as a glass of Champagne. “I’m Nanette Fabray!” he said, referring to another Band Wagon cast member.

“It was the only meeting I’d ever been in where everyone said, ‘That’s our Hitler!’” quoting the classic line Mel Brooks wrote for The Producers.

Sitting in Spielberg’s offices at Amblin Entertainment on the back lot of Universal Studios one afternoon, Shaiman and Wittman began throwing out ideas for the television show. Their template was, of course, The Band Wagon—the “drama, the laughter, the tears just like pearls” (to quote the Smash number “Let Me Be Your Star”) involved in making a Broadway musical. Wittman came up with the idea of a fictional musical about Monroe, which he called Bombshell.

“Everybody pretty much knows the Marilyn Monroe story,” Shaiman said. Wittman explained, “We wouldn’t have to fill in the blanks. It was the only meeting I’d ever been in where everyone said, ‘That’s our Hitler!’ ” quoting the classic line Mel Brooks wrote for The Producers.

According to Greenblatt, Spielberg wanted Aaron Sorkin to write the script, but Sorkin had about eight million projects in the hopper, so the producers turned to Theresa Rebeck, a talented and prolific playwright whose Omnium Gatherum was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004. She also wrote for Law & Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue. “She navigated both television and theater,” Meron said. “It was a good idea to bring her on.”

Rebeck took Wittman’s idea of making a musical about Monroe and surrounded it with memorable theater types: a songwriting team loosely modeled on the fabled Betty Comden and Adolph Green; two young, hungry actors vying for the part of Marilyn; a handsome if slightly sleazy British director; and a tough-as-nails female producer, inspired in part by the legendary Elizabeth I. McCann. (In the 1990s, when she was coproducing the flop musical Nick & Nora—based on the wisecracking couple from the Thin Man films—McCann invited the critics to her house for Thanksgiving. “It will be the only turkey I intend to be serving this year,” she wrote in a letter to Variety.)

Rebeck also sprinkled in references to real-life Broadway personalities, including yours truly. I was the theater columnist for the New York Post at the time and not always the most popular person in Shubert Alley. In the pilot script, one of the characters referred to me as a “Napoleonic little Nazi.” A source slipped me the script, and I printed excerpts in my column. Rebeck called me up: “Oh, my God! Do you hate me for calling you a Nazi?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m flattered to be mentioned. Besides, I’ve been called worse.”

“What?”

“Fair, balanced, accurate.”

Rebeck then asked if I’d appear as myself on the TV show. Well, I said, there might be a slight problem. I’d gone after the musical 9 to 5 in one of my columns. That show’s producer was none other than Bob Greenblatt. And I’d printed some dishy backstage gossip about the revival of Promises, Promises, whose coproducers were…Craig Zadan and Neil Meron.

“I don’t think they’ll be too happy to see me on the set,” I told Rebeck.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s my show,” she fired back.

Okay, I thought, and started working on my Emmy speech.

A few weeks later I ran into Bernie Telsey, the casting director of Smash, at a Broadway opening. “I just read your sides,” he said. “They’re great.” (Sides are what we network television stars call scenes.) But when I got home around two in the morning, there was an email from Telsey: “Sorry to say the table read went long today, so we’ve had to cut your scene. We look forward to working with you in the future.”

A little chilly, I must say, but I smiled. I knew I could make mischief.

I called Rebeck the next morning to get the lowdown. “They really hate you,” she said. “But I’m working on it!”

“I’ll work on it too,” I replied.

As it happened, I was due to appear that week on Don Imus’s hugely influential radio show. I leaked the news of my dismissal from Smash to Page Six, knowing Imus would see it. And, sure enough, the first thing he said to me on air was: “What’s this I read about you being cut from this Smash thing?”

“Well, Don,” I said, “I think some of the producers of the show are mad at me about some negative columns I wrote about their Broadway shows. But there are no hard feelings. And if they ever come back to Broadway”—and here I paused for dramatic effect—“I will welcome them with open arms.”

There was a malicious glint in Imus’s eyes. He knew what I was up to. “Here’s the thing, Riedel,” he said. “If you’re on Smash and associated with us, we look like winners. But if you’re cut from Smash, you make us look like losers.”

And then he called for a boycott of Smash.

When I got home—and I swear on Shakespeare’s First Folio that this is true—I had an email from Telsey. “Happy to say your scene has been reinstated,” he wrote, this time warmly.

When I arrived on the set, Meron and Zadan were there. They couldn’t have been nicer. We laughed about it all, exchanged some showbiz gossip, and got on with the job. I met with cast member Anjelica Huston—Oscar winner and Hollywood royalty—and as we went over the scene, I rewrote it a little bit to give myself some extra lines.

I mentioned that to Meron for this article. He laughed and said, “We had final cuts so we knew we could drop your lines.”

Touché.

NBC spared no expense on Smash. The pilot alone reportedly cost $7.5 million. Said Greenblatt: “It’s Steven Spielberg. We can’t make this look cheesy. We had to deliver the goods.”

The cast was sensational—McPhee and Hilty, both powerhouse belters, as the actors vying to play Marilyn; Will & Grace star Debra Messing and Broadway leading man Christian Borle as the songwriting team; the laconically handsome Davenport as the British director (it was said that mothers in Park Slope, his neighborhood back then, would time their stroller pushing to coincide with his); and Huston as the tenacious producer.

NBC unveiled the pilot of Smash at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in January 2012. The screening received a standing ovation. Everybody was well lubricated at the after-party, which was held at the Temple of Dendur. Elice was there, and so was I. Elice remembered: “I think I was trying to catch your attention, but you were eyeing a sarcophagus.”

Smash was firing on all cylinders. It was, Shaiman and Wittman recalled, like working at the famous Arthur Freed unit at MGM, named after the producer who oversaw Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Brigadoon, and Gigi.

Shaiman and Wittman were writing their Broadway show Catch Me If You Can while knocking out songs for Smash. “We were churning them out quite constantly,” Wittman said. “We used to have a joke, ‘Oh, I’ve written 400 songs since lunch.’ ”

Bergasse, the choreographer, had been plucked from obscurity out of regional theaters. He couldn’t believe the resources he now had at his disposal. It would be great, he once said, if he could have a bunch of dancers and a set to stage a number on. Fine, execs at NBC said. “We’ll build it tonight. You’ll have the set tomorrow. Hire the dancers right now. We’ll get them here at 10 a.m.”

Well-known theater people floated through the episodes: Harvey Fierstein, hilariously soaking up all the gossip on Bombshell; Bernadette Peters, delivering a rehearsal-room-shaking rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from Gypsy; and me, popping up from behind a banquette right after a fight has broken out. “Is the Bombshell team…combusting again?” I snickered.

My wife recently saw that episode. “You’re a terrible actor,” she said.

Thank you, darling.

And then there was Liza Minnelli, whose cameo called for her to walk along a restaurant bar, deliver a line or two, and then sing a song. I was at the bar, and when Minnelli got to me, she stroked my cheek and ad-libbed, “Hello, darling!” Her next line, delivered to Hilty, was supposed to be, “Wait here, I’m going to powder my nose.” But Minnelli was having fun ad-libbing. “Wait here,” she said. “I’m going to go baste a turkey.” And then she took a break.

I wandered around before we went back in to finish our takes, and I didn’t see her anywhere. She wasn’t in her trailer. She wasn’t in hair and makeup. She wasn’t by the craft services table. Then I happened to be poking around one of the unused sets when a cigarette pierced the darkness. And there was Minnelli, puffing away under a No Smoking sign. We both came back to the set, finished the scene, and everything turned out fine. In fact, Minnelli breaks your heart singing “A Love Letter From the Times,” a tender Shaiman and Wittman ballad. Liza Minnelli: always a pro in the end.

As much fun as it was to be on the set, trouble began brewing in the writers room. Rebeck, according to reports at the time, wanted to deepen the characters by revealing more of their troubled domestic lives. Others wanted to stick to the drama of creating a Broadway musical. Rebeck, one of the few female writers to oversee a network show back then, felt ganged up on by the mostly male producers, she wrote in an essay published in Entertainment Weekly. Her detractors said she refused to collaborate, ruling like a prime-time Eva Perón. At the end of the first season, she was let go. New writers were hired, and the number of executive producers listed in the credits exploded. (I often thought that if I’d had just a few more lines, I, too, could have been an executive producer.) Characters came and went. A show modeled on Rent became the rival to Bombshell. The first season of Smash was tight and true. The sec-ond, critics complained, was rudderless and forced.

“The second season lacked verisimilitude,” Davenport said. “But that’s just my opinion.” Or, as Shaiman put it, “Without wanting to get into all that, there were just too many chefs.”

Greenblatt did all he could to protect Smash by moving it around NBC’s schedule, where it might get a lift from other programs. “But it just didn’t have the same staying power,” he said. “We did it and we did it really well, and I didn’t want to do another season if we were just going to drag out a [slow] death. It was best to end it, but it was heartbreaking.”

Rebeck recently told me that she has no desire to relitigate the past: “I wanted [Smash] to be a love letter to the theater, something that would show how special Broadway and musicals are, how deranged and fascinating and passionate theater artists can be. I am thrilled to see how many people are still in love with the world and characters I created. That show was really important to me, and still is.”

About the only two theater people who didn’t follow the trials and travails of Smash were Martin and Elice. “I’ve written a lot about the process of creating theater,” Martin said, “but I don’t enjoy watching depictions of it, to be perfectly honest with you. My partner loved it. I was neutral.”

“I was deep into technical rehearsals for a play opening on Broadway,” Elice recalled. “I didn’t even know what night of the week it was on. I still don’t have a DVR, so if I miss it, I miss it.”

Martin and Elice know their way around a theater. In addition to The Drowsy Chaperone, Martin also wrote the delightful musical The Prom as well as Slings & Arrows, a Canadian television show about a small Shakespearean festival. Elice spent nearly 20 years as a theater ad executive, designing campaigns for such shows as A Chorus Line and The Lion King, before he cowrote Jersey Boys and The Addams Family. He also wrote The Cher Show.

Martin and Elice were working on another show—it wasn’t going well, they said—when their agent called about Smash. They thought about their own experiences writing musicals. And one thing struck them: “The show that you end up creating is not the show you intend to create,” Martin said.

“You think you’re sailing from here to there, and then the wind starts blowing and suddenly you’re sailing over there, to the kitchen,” Elice added, gesturing to the back of Joe Allen, where he and Martin were enjoying a beer and a martini during our interview.

Without giving too much away, the premise of the stage version of Smash is that of a Broadway team trying to put on a cotton candy version of Marilyn Monroe’s life when everything goes horribly—and hilariously—awry. “It’s a rip-roaring comedy!” Elice, ever the ad man, pitched.

Martin, a little more subdued, said: “Well, we hope. We’ll see what the reviews say.” Being in the theater is “the only job where you have to explain your failure to your family because it’s in the paper.”

After the Spielberg-approved reading, Greenblatt and Meron drew up a list of potential directors. At the top was Susan Stroman, who staged the greatest backstage Broadway musical of all time, The Producers, which won 12 Tony Awards in 2001.

But there was a glitch. Stroman directs and choreographs all her musicals. But Greenblatt and Meron wanted to use Bergasse’s choreography from the television show. Stroman, who has five Tony Awards on her shelf, agreed to a dinner with Bergasse to “make sure he’s okay with me being in charge.” They hit it off and, for the first time in her career, Stroman is not choreographing while also directing. But she is “in charge,” and Bergasse knows that, for him, the bar is high.

Stroman also agreed to do Smash because she loved the TV show and the way Martin and Elice adapted it for the stage. “It’s not unlike The Producers,” she said, “in the sense of full-on comic eccentric characters. But they have some depth.”

“People fight. People drink. People swear. People behave badly. People go off the deep end.” But then, as so often happens in the theater, they pull themselves up and get on with the show.

A major change is that Ivy Lynn, a seasoned chorus girl in the television series, is now a Broadway star of a certain age. Stroman cast Robyn Hurder, a veteran of 10 Broadway shows, to play the part. Hurder thought she’d “bombed” her audition, ran to a bar, and drank a big martini. An hour later, her agent called. The job was hers. She downed another martini, ate “a 10-ounce filet mignon and pile of Parmesan truffle fries” and then headed to the theater for a performance of the show she was in at the time, A Beautiful Noise, a tribute to Neil Diamond.

Brooks Ashmanskas is playing a gay director whose sensibility is out of sync with our more politically correct times; Rodriguez is the lyricist and book writer of Bombshell; John Behlmann plays her husband, the composer, who grabs a drink every time things blow up; and Nielsen is an acting guru who casts a spell over Ivy Lynn.

In the winter of 2024, Stroman directed a six-week workshop of Smash at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. Workshop might be an understatement. There were sets, costumes, and wigs. The workshop was so lavish, the cast called it their “out-of-town tryout on the Upper East Side.”

The curiosity within the theater industry about Smash 2.0, as Greenblatt calls it, was intense. A friend of mine who attended the workshop said: “Usually, you run away from these things, but everybody was fighting to get a ticket. And we lapped it up. There was huge affection for it. We recognized ourselves and this ridiculous life we lead.”

But Greenblatt and Meron didn’t trust an audience of insiders. They distributed plenty of free tickets to “civilians,” as theater people call those unfortunate souls who don’t happen to be in show business. The civilians, who filled out surveys, loved it too. Except the ending, which they hated. No revelations here, but let’s just say Smash took a dark turn. It was “a swing,” Rodriguez said with admiration. But the audience wasn’t having it. “There was a backlash,” Hurder recalled.

So Martin and Elice did what theater writers do when “the wind blows you in a different direction” and you don’t want to end up in the kitchen at Joe Allen: They rewrote the final scene.

Smash now ends on an upbeat note. But the show is not a sappy love letter to the theater. Martin and Elice have knocked around Shubert Alley too long to stoop to that. They were once up against each other for the Tony Award for best book: Martin for The Drowsy Chaperone, Elice for Jersey Boys. Martin won. “Sometimes he brings his Tony Award with him when we write, just to remind me,” Elice said.

It’s that cynical sense of humor that gives Smash its edge.

“People fight. People drink. People swear,” Martin said.

“People behave badly,” Elice added. “People go off the deep end.” But then, as so often happens in the theater, they pull themselves up and get on with the show.

And overseeing that show is Spielberg. I’m told he’s been bitten by the theater bug, and I wondered if he might ever direct a Broadway show himself.

It’s been 60 years, he said, “since I stood on the boards” at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, working on productions of Guys and Dolls and Arsenic and Old Lace. “But I don’t rule it out.”