My friends and family know how musicals are just about my favorite thing in the world, so I was over-the-moon happy when Smash premiered on TV last winter. The NBC drama documented the course of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe, called Bombshell, from inception to writing, from casting to rehearsal, from workshop to production.
Despite spectacularly good musical numbers written by the Tony Award-winning Broadway songwriting team of Hairspray - Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman - and great choreography by Joshua Bergasse (who won this year's Emmy Award for Best Choreography), the storytelling was inconsistent. Characters that were kind and supportive one moment were suddenly bitchy the next. The writers spent too much time on the melodramatic personal stories and not enough time on the process of creation. I loved the idea of the show, but I laid out my reservations on the direction of the series in a lengthy article last spring toward the end of the first season.
Now, I'm excited by the February 5th premiere of Season Two, with a new showrunner Joshua Safran. The series creator Theresa Rebeck, despite her reputation as a playwright, was deemed the major problem with the first season and she was let go. In a lengthy interview for Playbill.com, Safran speaks directly to the many changes coming to my favorite show on television.
Here's the link to the interview:
STAGE TO SCREENS: Joshua Safran, the New Storyteller of "Smash," Talks About Season Two - Playbill.com
- by Jonathan Lewis
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