Susan Stroman on delivering a ‘big punch’ of musical comedy in ‘Smash,’ and the biggest onstage mishap of her career
“It feels wonderful because you invest so much of yourself in every individual show,” reflects Susan Stroman on the recognition she has received for directing the new Broadway musical Smash. The theater legend earned a Drama League Award nomination for Best Direction, and the show collected three more bids for Best Musical and Distinguished Performers Brooks Ashmanskas and Robyn Hurder. The citations for her cast members mean just as much to her because “they’re not only incredible performers, but they’re great leaders of the company, too. They’re good human beings.” The five-time Tony winner recently sat down with Gold Derby to discuss adapting the beloved NBC television series about the creation of a Marilyn Monroe musical to the stage.
In this iteration of Smash, audiences see the cast and creatives of the fictional musical Bombshell try to get their show to its opening night, even though the journey is replete with hilarious mishaps and self-inflected wounds. A veteran of 22 different Broadway productions as a performer, choreographer, and director, Stroman has seen her fair share of backstage antics and catastrophes, so much so that she admits, “Everything that happens in Smash, I’ve actually gone through and more.” The biggest disaster she’s ever had in one of her shows occurred one year in which she staged A Christmas Carol at Madison Square Garden: “One night, in the middle of Fezziwig’s Ball, all the gravestones lifted up from the opening number ... all these people went down into the holes!”
SEE Tony Talk: How will ‘Boop! The Musical’ and ‘Smash’ affect the Best Musical race?
Despite the hilarity that ensues during Smash, it does pull back the curtain on the creative process in a way that industry folks will recognize. “The whole meta part of Smash is that it’s about a creative team trying to put on a musical comedy, and here is a real creative team trying to put on a musical comedy,” says Stroman. No stranger to successful musical comedies herself — even 24 years after it debuted, The Producers is still the winningest musical in Tony Awards history with 12 victories — the director shares that although there is no secret recipe for theatrical success, one important facet to this genre is “the importance of collaboration and the cross-fertilization of all the departments and being able to listen and putting egos outside the door.”
Smash takes a different approach to its story than its source material. Instead of a rivalry between actresses Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee) for the plum role of Monroe that defined the television show, the musical chronicles the creative team at Bombshell as they combat Ivy’s decision to turn to Method acting to better inhabit the legendary actress who she portrays. The concept, born from librettists Bob Martin and Rick Elice, delighted Stroman, who admits, “I was so pleased with how funny it was because I adored the TV show, but it was a soap opera, it was very dramatic.” When the team unveiled their “new look at a backstage musical,” the director read their script with “relief and excitement.”
The musical begins with all the vim and vigor that has characterized Stroman’s career: the beloved song “Let Me Be Your Star” opens Smash, with Hurder as Monroe dancing through many of the most iconic moments of the film star’s career. Though it became the perfect opening number for the show, the director reveals that the book didn’t initially start this way. The first draft “started in the rehearsal room,” and the Tony winner feared that it wouldn’t “grab an audience.” She devised a new beginning, but with a twist: “What if we did a big, beautiful number with Marilyn Monroe and then somehow we magically, at the end, transformed into the rehearsal room, and then all the creative teams talked about it and talked about how they saw it with sets and lights and costumes?” That extra bit of imagination not only enabled the show to open with “a big punch for the real audience,” but it didn’t feel like a stretch for Stroman, who shares, “When I hear music, I hear it and visualize it. ... I imagine hordes of people dancing through my head, and they are costumed and wigged.”
“Let Me Be Your Star” returns as the Act 1 finale, but with one very unexpected change. Without spoiling the moment for readers who haven’t seen Smash yet, suffice it to say that this scene was “the first image” that Stroman had in mind when she read the script. She immediately set to work untangling how to make the development work “so you didn’t see it coming.” While Smash is indubitably a musical comedy, it also requires moments of drama and high stakes, from this big finish before intermission to an earlier scene at the sitzprobe, which is the name for the event when the orchestra and company perform the full score together for the first time. In the scene, Karen (Caroline Bowman) has taken the reigns from an absent Ivy, but Ivy unexpectedly “comes up from behind” so the audience sees her entrance before any of the characters do. “I wanted to stage it almost like a shark coming in, so that the shark slowly comes up, really slowly behind it. … It works like gangbusters,” recalls the director with a huge smile.
SEE our interview with Bob Martin, 'Smash' librettist
This adaptation of Smash is also set in the present day and offers a commentary on the new practices surrounding the promotion of a musical, including the pivotal role of positive word-of-mouth online during preview performances. “The idea of tapping into the influencers and what is happening to Broadway today is a big deal because Instagram, Twitter/X, and all that can change the perception of a show,” notes Stroman of the pertinence of this plot point. This new reality sticks in the craw of Bombshell’s director Nigel (Ashmanskas), who “only cares about a real audience and the breath of a real audience.” Stroman has collaborated with Ashmanskas before and calls him not only “a master” at comedy, but also an “amazing dancer and singer.”
Stroman herself has collaborated with many stellar musical theater composers, including Mel Brooks and John Kander and Fred Ebb, staging and choreographing The Producers and Young Frankenstein with the former and The Scottsboro Boys, New York, New York, and more with the latter duo. She says of these decade-long partnerships, “They’re masters at what they do. … They’ve taught me how to collaborate more and more.” One of the best lessons they collectively instilled in the 15-time Tony nominee is that “even if it sounds like a bad idea, just say it and throw it on the table, because someone else can take that idea and turn it into gold.”
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