The only thing that most people know about Smash, NBC’s two-season wonder about the making of a Broadway musical that aired in 2012 and 2013, was that it was awful. Though the pilot was promising and featured both a great cast and some whiz-bang musical numbers, the show quickly descended into chaos, hemorrhaged viewers, and became the crux of a million articles about the new age of hate-watching.
It might come as a surprise, then, that the hottest ticket in New York is currently Bombshell: The Musical, a concert version of the faux Marilyn Monroe-inspired musical that the characters on the show were crafting.
On 8 June, producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (who were executive producers on the show along with Steven Spielberg and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman) will present Bombsell as a one-night-only benefit concert for the Actors Fund, a charity that provides money and services for actors in need. Many of the original cast of Smash – including Katherine McPhee, Megan Hilty, Debra Messing, Will Chase and Christian Borle – will perform the songs (and hopefully dances) from their fake musical for the first time on a Broadway stage.
Zadan and Meron held a Kickstarter to see if there would be interest in the production and it raised $225,000 its first day, pushing it well past its goal and raising another $100,000 before finally cashing out. Tickets went on sale in April and the 1,600 seats sold out in an hour during a pre-sale for those who contributed to the Kickstarter. Since tickets were snatched up before being sold to the general public, they’re now going on the open market for almost $3,000 apiece with the cheapest seat going for $1,039, about 10 times the ticket to an average Broadway show.
How did this show that was universally reviled and whose audience shrank from 11.4 million for its premiere to under 2 million in its final season become the greatest thing on the Great White Way?
That’s because for New York’s rabid tribe of musical theatre loyalists, Smash never died. You can’t go to a karaoke night between 42nd and 57th streets without someone with a musical theatre degree semi-ironically singing Let Me Be Your Star, the signature song from the show. Indeed, while the show was absolutely wretched, there was a certain joy that many took in watching the horror unfold week after week, and none more than the insular clique who put on eight shows a week.
The spectacle of Smash’s awfulness and backstage drama (excellently chronicled by Kate Aurthur at Buzzfeed) was wonderful to behold, especially for those who knew the theatre world intimately and most likely had friends in the production. However, the success of Bombshell on Broadway is not about hate-watching. I don’t think a staged version of NBC’s equally campy and equally reviled Peter Pan Live would fare as well at the box office. This is more about a small group of people in New York who treasure Smash partially because it is so bad. These are the same people that trade Playbills of notorious flops like Carrie: The Musical and tell tales about wretched performances around the bar at Joe Allen.
This special night also celebrates the best thing about Smash: the songs. Shaiman and Whitman’s contributions were always the highlight of each episode, even if they were delivered in a whirlpool of insane plots about pill addiction and Debra Messing’s over-reliance on scarves to do her acting. I have no doubt that Bombshell will be a great night full of exuberant fans rising to their feet at the end of every belt.
That’s not to say that an extended tour of Bombshell would sell a ton of tickets like the national tour of Glee did when that show was at its height. Sure, an Empire-related concert is sure to fill even Radio City Music Hall, but outside New York, where so few people watched this short-lived show, it would probably be hard to even give the tickets away.
Bombshell: The Musical is a special one-time event and attendance will be a point of pride for everyone who knows all the words to the score from Chess. I’m sure it will be wonderful and will raise a lot of money for a deserving charity. Finally, after all the dreck it put out in the world, Smash is finally doing some good and getting just a little bit of respect in return.
