Interview: Bob Martin and Rick Elice on Adapting a TV Cult Classic in Smash

The average fan of NBC’s TV hit-turned-hate watch Smash loves to tell you why they love it more than most. Rick Elice has them all beat.

At the time it was shooting, the playwright was working with cast member Christian Borle on Peter and the Starcatcher.

“As a gag, I think Bernie Telsey, who did the casting for the TV series, called me and said, ‘Would you like to be in an episode?’” Elice told TheaterMania. “And I said, ‘Well, if I can surprise Christian on set, that would be almost worth taking a ferry to Staten Island,’ where they were shooting. So, I did. I had a very rude line to a nice woman sitting next to me at what was the very first performance of Bombshell, the Marilyn Monroe musical, and I was sitting directly in front of Christian and Debra Messing…but apparently, I was cut. [My character] was too rude. Welcome to show business. Too rude!”

“You got your revenge!” Bob Martin cracked.

Did he ever. Elice and Martin co-wrote the book to the just-premiered Smash Broadway musical, a love letter to theater with insider jokes and killer songs (by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, almost all of which are from the TV show). But Broadway’s Smash goes for more laughs than the decidedly dramatic NBC series. Here, Elice and Martin tell us about the long journey to the stage.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re talking to someone who went to the Smash one-night-only concert at the Minskoff in 2015, so I have been a fan and hoped that this project was going to come to fruition for a long time. How did you both get involved?
Bob Martin: That concert was one of the things that inspired Smash. The intention was always to create a musical that sort of grew out of the television show, but for various reasons that didn’t happen. The concert was quite successful, and I think everything that’s in the concert is in the stage show.

But Rick and I pitched an approach to the producers for making a stage version of Smash [itself]; not attempting to make a musical about Marilyn Monroe, but instead making a musical about the making of a musical about Marilyn Monroe. And we also pitched that it would be a completely different genre, and then it would be sort of fanfic; it would be not a literal translation of the TV show. We were shocked that they said yes!

Rick Elice: That would have been 2018. Bob and I were young, neophyte writers on Broadway, and now here we are, seven years later. In fact, someone in the play says, “seven years of our lives.” It’s just one indication of how meta the show is; the characters are actually saying things that are remarkably true for everybody working on the show.

Covid interrupted the process for a couple of years, so I guess we were looking at five years of moving forward. Although Bob and I did a lot of writing during Covid. It sort of kept me alive having our writing sessions during Covid, because working with Bob Martin is something that keeps one alive.

Obviously, this is common in jukebox musicals, but did you come up with a story when the songs have already been set?
Bob: It is similar to the way you would construct a jukebox musical. All of these songs are diegetic in the show, with the exception of one, so they’re all part of rehearsal of the musical within the show. All the songs are related to Marilyn Monroe in some way.

The thing that’s so interesting about this project is that they are songs from a fictional musical. They don’t tell any story. There’s a lot of ballads, for instance. So the only way we could do it was by showing them kind of out of order in a rehearsal process.

One of my favorite things about the show is all the behind-the-scenes theater references. There’s obviously a Sardi’s stand in, and there’s the line about Schmackary’s cookies. Can you talk about wanting to show that behind-the-scenes fun and maybe making audiences feel like they’re insiders?
Bob: There’s always a push and pull regarding real detail. The producers would argue, “Nobody knows what this means!” And we would always reply, “We’re educating the audience. Those who do know what it means will really get it, and those who don’t will quickly understand that this is an authentic part of the Broadway experience.” We created the character of Scott initially to define certain things for the audience that they might not know about, like sitzprobe. He educates the audience as to what that is.

But we’re always pushing to put real detail in it. So yes, there are some things that somebody from the Midwest would probably not understand, but I always say, you watch a show about forensic pathology, you have no idea what they’re talking about, but you get sucked into the lives of the characters, and you soon sort of understand.

Rick: A Chorus Line, for example, was a show that we’re all familiar with that was inherently about Broadway. And it played for 15 years, not because every night the audience was full of Broadway dancers. There’s inside stuff. But what the story is really about a group of people coming together to try to make something. It could be an automobile, but it just so happens, what these people are trying to make is a musical comedy, and that comes with music and dancing and singing, and all the drama and farcical upheaval that comes with a group of people trying to make anything.

Whether you understand the inside stuff or not, it’s a fun story, because the big relatable thing is something I think that everybody has experienced at some point in their lives: being part of a group of people trying to make something and what the hell do we do now?

To me, this show is clearly a love letter to Broadway. Why do you love this enduring community?
Bob: First of all, I’m Canadian, and I only came to New York in 2005 [for The Drowsy Chaperone] and so nobody knew me when I arrived, but I was immediately embraced by the community in a way that I’d never experienced before. There was really no sense of competing with one another. I remember that year at the Tonys, after I was lucky enough to win one, I was going off stage while the company of Wedding Singer was going on stage, and they were all applauding and cheering me. And it was so moving, I’ve just never felt so welcomed before. It’s a wonderful thing to work with people who are so dedicated to what they do and really, really know what they do. It’s just a wonderful place.

Rick: My parents took me to see a Broadway show when I was three years old, when tickets were 90 cents and it was cheaper than a babysitter to just sort of drag me and my brother along to the theater. I just thought, “I’ll never, ever be able to be inside that stage door up on that stage where the thing is happening.”

I was content as a kid to watch it, but always dreamed of being part of it. It became a grand passion of my life before I even understood what a grand passion was, just to be able to walk into a stage door and not have somebody say, “Excuse me, what are you doing here?” It’s the greatest feeling in the world to hear an audience cheer for a great song or laugh at something that Bob and I have written. It’s the greatest sense of inclusion in the world.