Smash Down

This season's Smash.

Ten episodes into Smash, it’s likely you either love it, hate it or just don’t care. I have to admit that Smash is quickly becoming my guilty pleasure of choice. I like seeing Broadway veterans like Megan Hilty, Will Chase, Brian d’Arcy James and Christian Borle play major roles. I like seeing phenomenal actors like Ann Harada featured. I love seeing Broadway insiders like Jordan Roth, Manny Azenberg and Robyn Goodman play cameos. But there’s a dark side to loving Smash. Almost none of it is any way, shape or form an authentic representation of how a play or musical can get produced on Broadway.

On Smash, Workshops (with a capital “W”) get produced without a script or all the songs completed. Who cares if the show’s not ready, you don’t have a title or couldn’t likely take any investors because you don’t know where you’re going much less if you have a show or not? On Smash money (or at least really expensive art) hangs on walls just waiting to be taken down and sold to the nearest rock star standing next to you. It doesn’t matter that you may be adding 200K to what will become an oversized budget. Who cares if that two hundred thousand dollars might have been put to better use enhancing a development production…or sending the writers to a remote cabin in the Poconos and telling them not to come out until they’ve written an actual musical.

Ok. Ok. I’ll admit it. I think one of the reasons I love this show is because at least once in every episode there’s a plot element or assertion that is, quite frankly, completely ass-backward. I love seeing the characters do something that brings the whole “reality facade” come crashing down.

Don’t be fooled. Smash is fun. Smash is entertaining but it’s not Broadway. It’s Dallas meets Melrose Place meets All About Eve meets insert-your-favorite-musical-here. No, Smash isn’t real Broadway. I like to think of it as “broadway” with a little “Smash-magic”.

So far it’s been fun. And the creators do a fair job of hanging their melodramatic flag high and then pulling it back without getting too out of control. (I like that they’ve pulled back a little from making Jaime Cepero’s character too terribly dastardly. Oh that Ellis is still a piece of work, and he might go all “Alexis Carrington” on us yet. But Angelica Huston’s producing maven “Eileen Rand” keeps him in his place quite nicely.)

Have fun with Smash. Enjoy that “Smash magic”. Spend an hour a week living that dream. And then go and treat yourself to a real Broadway show.