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[0:00] Aaron Albano: You're listening to Smash from The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm Aaron Albano.

[0:11] Mo Brady: And I'm Mo Brady.

[0:30] Aaron Albano: Welcome back, listeners, to our tongue-in-cheek recap of what is television's most detailed depiction of the theatre industry. And yes, we're still talking about Smash, the NBC series that chronicled the creation of a Broadway musical and all of the drama that ensued along the way.

[0:47] Mo Brady: We've been going back, episode by episode, to see how this supposed love letter to Broadway has held up over the past decade. In each podcast episode, we're looking to find the answers to these three questions. Did it represent Broadway then? Does it represent Broadway now? And is it any good? So let's dive in and talk about episode 4 of Season 2, The Song. Aaron, give us the stats.

[1:07] Aaron Albano: If you insist, Mo.

[1:13] Mo Brady: I do. The Song premiered on February 26, 2013. It was written by Bathsheba Doran and directed by Michael Morris, whose work we last saw in the Season 2 premiere. The viewership was down a quarter million from last week, amounting to 3.04 million viewers tuning in on premiere night.

[1:31] Aaron Albano: We had five featured songs in this episode, with only one pop cover this week. Yay!

[1:36] Mo Brady: Show your cards, Aaron!

[1:40] Aaron Albano: That cover was Billy Joel's Everybody Loves You Now, sung by Andy Mientus and Jennifer Hudson.

[1:45] Mo Brady: The only other non-original song was I Got Love from the musical Purlie, featured both in its original arrangement and its more Derek Wills-esque risqué arrangement. Lastly, we had three Shaiman/Whitman originals, I'm Not Lost, Chest of Broken Hearts, and the titular song itself, I Can't Let Go. And what happens in this episode, Mo?

[2:06] Mo Brady: Veronica Moore has got love for her new one-night-only concert, but with a song list of her greatest hits, Derek is afraid the showcase is just another good girl role for Broadway's sweetheart. As if by kismet, Kyle and Jimmy are looking to get noticed by trying out their material somewhere that counts. That place just happens to be Veronica's concert, where Derek challenges the duo to present him with a new song for her to debut. As the concert's music director, Tom tells Kyle and Jimmy that while their trunk songs are good, they aren't right for this concert. Kyle responds that they'll write something Ronnie and Derek, Broadway and them, in the next 24 hours, the same time it took Sondheim to write Send in the Clowns. But when Veronica's momager threatens to fire Derek for making the concert too adult, he succumbs and tells Kyle and Jimmy their services are no longer needed.

[2:58] Mo Brady: One of the concert's backup dancers goes M.I.A. as, and I quote, "my boyfriend requested I no longer work with Derek." Ivy Lynn pinch hits. As it turns out, she was a swing when Veronica was Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. And more surprising than Ivy Lynn being a swing in Little Shop of Horrors is that Karen is OK with Ivy working on this concert with her. Julia feels hoodwinked when Peter the dramaturg invites her to his NYU class only to have his students critique her Bombshell script. But after confronting him about his games, they end up day drinking on a weekday and cracking the code to fixing her Bombshell script. Ivy ends up becoming mother hen to the concert, inspiring both Ronnie and Derek to listen to their guts when it comes to a more adult song list. And that final song list ends up including a new song by Jimmy and Kyle after all: a soaring ballad called I Can't Let Go.

[3:54] Aaron Albano: One last coda. Bombshell is freed from its legal troubles and OK to move to Broadway. But under one condition, Eileen isn't allowed to produce anymore. Somehow that pesky Ellis still ruins everything.

[4:05] Mo Brady: Ellis Ellis. Oh, my gosh. All right, listeners, a little look into making the sausage. Aaron texted me he didn't like this episode, and I texted him back that I really did like this episode. I was shocked.

[4:26] Aaron Albano: Yeah, we're so excited to duke it out live on Mike.

[4:37] Mo Brady: So, OK, Mo, convince me, why did you like this episode?

[4:41] Mo Brady: OK, there are four main reasons that I liked this episode. One, there's an immediacy to the proceedings. There is a concert. It is happening soon. It's happening tomorrow or is happening today. Right? Like so much of Bombshell sort of exists in this like we're doing a workshop for something that doesn't have an audience and it's not even we don't even really know where it's going. There's a thing they have to put up a concert. Bravo was filming it. They need a song.

[5:08] Aaron Albano: Right.

[5:08] Mo Brady: There is an immediacy to the proceedings. Yes. Number two, we see Karen and Ivy having a multilayered relationship. So much of them has been Karen and Ivy pitted against each other or then becoming fast friends and drinking and then being pitted against each other. And right. This is like they have to work together. We see them. There's those great shots of them being the backup dancers and like dancing with each other in like scandalous poses, which is fantastic. There's just so it's so layered. You're finally seeing kind of under the surface level of these of the relationship between these two women.

[5:45] Aaron Albano: Don't interrupt me, Aaron.

[5:46] Mo Brady: OK, fine. Number three, Julia finally stops playing the victim. Julia has been playing the victim since season one, episode one. Right? Poor her. She's she's. Yes. No one wants to write her. No one wants to produce her musical. She just wants to make a musical about Marilyn. She just wants to be a good wife. She just wants to be with Michael Swift. Right? Like she just wants to be a good mom. Right? And so finally, she says, I know how to fix this script. And that feels good as a viewer to be like, yes, finally, I can root for you, Julia. Thank you.

[6:21] Mo Brady: Number four, Jennifer Hudson sings I Got Love from Purlie. OK, this is Jennifer Hudson, who sings the phone book as if it is the Bible. And she's singing one of the most joyous songs in the musical theater canon effortlessly.

[6:37] Aaron Albano: Yes, she does. She absolutely does.

[6:43] Mo Brady: I will get on board with you for that. For those four reasons, I say yes. Good episode, Smash.

[6:50] Aaron Albano: OK, I hated this.

[6:51] Mo Brady: I didn't hate this. That's rude.

[6:58] Aaron Albano: I did not hate this episode. This episode was not one of my favorites, mainly because I don't care about any of this. I was like, this entire episode revolves around a concert. And then the entire like main story plot revolves around Veronica Moore getting cold feet about doing what she said she wanted to do in the last episode.

[7:20] Mo Brady: I'm like, if we're going to have everybody yelling and screaming about like, does Veronica Moore do what she has always done or does she take a risk? I'm sorry. Let's rewind to the last episode where she literally said she wanted a career-changing concert.

[7:38] Aaron Albano: Secondly, I love Jeremy Jordan so much. I hate Jimmy Collins with a fierce rage. I remember watching this originally, and maybe it was because I was more immediately like, Jeremy's my friend. I love watching him on the show. He left the show for this. Whatever, whatever, whatever. That like, my disdain for Jimmy was tempered a little bit. This episode, I would throw him off a bridge, like, and not bat an eye because, whoa.

[8:07] Mo Brady: And then Eileen's legal troubles. It was an entire like storyline. And I'm just like, okay, great.

[8:13] Aaron Albano: And then to wrap it all up, they might as well have given Jerry this maniacal laugh at the end of the episode. I was like, so he's now our supervillain?

[8:25] Mo Brady: And then he's writing a check to Ellis. That's when I'm like, okay, what are we doing here?

[8:31] Aaron Albano: I don't know what we're doing here.

[8:31] Mo Brady: You're right. Jennifer Hudson can sing whatever she wants, and I will be happy. But that is not enough for me.

[8:36] Aaron Albano: Okay, I'm gonna admit, I'm gonna give you some points back. Because I think I had said yes to this concert before the coda, right? It's not the best turn at the end. Sure.

[8:50] Mo Brady: Also, I will give you in the same way that the end of season one ended up becoming wrapped up in Uma Thurman. There is a feeling of like, why are we spending so much time on somebody that I wasn't sure I was really supposed to care about, which is Veronica Moore?

[9:07] Aaron Albano: Here's a question, because there have been many, many concerts on Broadway. We've seen them come around. A theater is empty between long-running hits and a star of varying levels can come in for a short amount of time. And while sometimes those are pop stars that are having an opportunity to showcase in a smaller venue than like Madison Square Garden, this feels more in line with like Liza with a Z, Liza at the Palace, or more contemporary versions of that, like Kristin Chenoweth's For the Girls, or Harry Connick Jr.'s concert that was also at the Nederlander this fall, right? Someone who is a theater person having a chance to do basically a big-ass cabaret.

[9:55] Mo Brady: Yeah, and so I think it's safe to say that this is Veronica Moore's, and I'm all about that. In the last episode, she says, what does she say? She says, I want to do a one-night-only show, the kind of concert that people talk about years from now and kick themselves for missing. From that quote, it sounds like she wants something to really stir things up and really change her image in the business. We find out about the concert last episode because she quit The Wiz to do this concert. She has left the role of Dorothy to do this one-night-only concert to change how she is seen in the business.

[10:39] Mo Brady: That was my central issue with the episode, is that they, both Tom and Cynthia, keep coming for Derek. That they're like, do what the people want, you need to do what she's comfortable with. Why wasn't Derek's first answer being like, she asked me for this? In hindsight, it is obvious that they're trying to set up Tom as a potential director for Bombshell, and so they're trying to give him opportunities to lead, to have vision, right?

[11:07] Aaron Albano: Okay, okay, I could buy that. He's trying to follow Veronica's lead, right? Veronica said she wanted to do the thing, and then she decided she didn't want to do the thing. And so he's trying to let her— I don't think Tom and Cynthia are aware of Derek's conversation with Veronica. And so, to me, watching the episode, watching last episode, Derek and Ronnie are operating under an idea that they want this concert to change Veronica Moore's image on Broadway. Cynthia and Tom are not privy to that conversation, so they think this is more of the same.

[11:46] Mo Brady: I feel like the only person who's privy to all of it is Ivy, who's in her conversation with Derek at the end is like, she wants to change, she's just scared, you need to help her and direct her instead of just forcing this upon her. Proving yet again that the team of Ivy and Derek is actually quite strong. The relationship of Ivy and Derek is not. The team of Ivy and Derek is great.

[12:14] Aaron Albano: Great. I loved the scene of Peter and Julia in the NYU class where—

[12:21] Mo Brady: I loved that scene.

[12:23] Aaron Albano: Okay, all right, see? It wasn't all bad, Aaron Albano.

[12:26] Mo Brady: It wasn't all bad. I just thought it was such a good way for us to look at the script. I felt like, finally, Smash wants to look into the quality of the story of Marilyn Monroe. And this was such a fun way to do it because, A, it was fun to sort of be, to know something the characters didn't, but B, I also thought it was a really smart move on Peter's part.

[12:45] Aaron Albano: I thought it was genius. I thought it was a wonderful tactic because clearly what he's saying is not getting through to her. And so this was just another way to illustrate his points about her script that she is so resistant to fixing that I'm just like, yo, listen to what's being said to you. But when she says on the street, when she's finally in her most vulnerable place, she says, I want Bombshell to be great. I just wish I knew what was wrong. I'm like, yo, we've had two episodes of this man, this beautiful, beautiful man telling you what's wrong with the show. Now you're finally in the place to see it and hear it. Why did it take this long? And why did it take this person? I mean, I guess, I guess that Peter is knowledgeable and he can, he knows how to make scripts better, right?

He says that he's a bad playwright, but he knows how to help other people. It's a great moment, especially when they're discussing their show, when she has the epiphany is such a satisfying moment as a viewer. Because it's that light bulb moment that all of us love when we like, have a breakthrough.

[14:00] Mo Brady: And I think that's the most relatable thing. What was weird about it is then I couldn't really follow how she was going to fix the show. It was she discovered that she was telling the story through how men see Marilyn, right?

[14:13] Aaron Albano: Yes. But I thought that the natural conclusion was that she was going to then write the story from Marilyn's point of view, right?

[14:20] Mo Brady: Me too. But then she decides to double down on the opposite of that, which is make every moment in the show about Marilyn through the lens, the man's perspective. And I was like, yeah, wait, what? Wait, Lee, at least she's looking at the script. I don't know.

[14:37] Aaron Albano: You're right. There was a very, there was that very satisfying moment where she's grabbing books off the shelf, and then she's handing them to Peter. And you're like, y'all are gonna fuck, right? That's the whole point of this thing.

[14:50] Mo Brady: Yes. But I do think, and to your credit, the moment that makes her journey good is the fact that she becomes open to the criticism. She is able to break down her guard, break down all of her insecurities, and actually listen to make her show better.

[15:14] Aaron Albano: Let's finally talk about Jimmy and Kyle. We've been putting Jimmy and Kyle on the back burner for this entire season so far. I feel like it's time. We talked about him a little bit last week, but let's really, we're seeing Jimmy and Kyle today.

[15:29] Mo Brady: Right. So Kyle's the book writer? Is that his job? In my mind, I thought that Kyle was the lyricist, but then—

[15:36] Aaron Albano: I thought it was a similar relationship to Tom and Julia.

[15:41] Mo Brady: Yeah.

[15:41] Aaron Albano: That he was book writer slash lyricist. No, Jimmy writes all the music. Kyle writes the book to the musical that he can't describe, because Jimmy—

[15:49] Mo Brady: There's all these other characters too.

[15:55] Aaron Albano: Yeah. So I'm like—

[15:57] Mo Brady: And we don't have a second act yet. What's your job?

[16:00] Aaron Albano: What's your job here? Like, yeah, that's where I was like, sorry, Kyle. Jimmy's kind of right. You don't do anything. At least we've seen yet.

[16:10] Mo Brady: Yeah, we don't. He doesn't do anything. And then I think on top of that sort of trope of the twink pining over the straight man who will never love him is just like, that is not the character that I'm going to get invested in.

[16:26] Aaron Albano: Which to be fair, would we have been more invested in it back in 2013? Just like more gay representation?

[16:30] Mo Brady: I feel like it was a world where that would have been more acceptable as an archetype we see ourselves in.

[16:39] Aaron Albano: Why is he here? I just don't know yet. I feel like their living relationship translates into their work relationship.

[16:46] Mo Brady: And their work relationship is garbage. Their work relationship is not good.

[16:51] Aaron Albano: Because it's Kyle managing this very volatile artist. Where did they meet? Did they go to school together? What is their collaboration? Have they written anything else together? Like there's so much about them that we don't know that it makes it really hard to invest.

[17:09] Mo Brady: Well, I think that what's difficult is also not even their relationship with each other, but basically without sounding weird, the show's relationship to them. It's a lot of, especially at the beginning of this episode, was a lot of lectures from Kyle to Jimmy about how this takes hard work, about how you don't, there are no shortcuts to Broadway. But then despite all of those quote unquote truths that we're hearing, we're watching all of it happen in a shortcut, streamlined sort of way.

[17:40] Aaron Albano: Which generally would be a good journey to watch because you want to see the outlier. But then you watch Jimmy think he deserves it. He thinks he is entitled to these shortcuts. Shown in his scene with Derek, where Derek is at the 11th hour of this other project that Jimmy wasn't even invited to, really. And then Jimmy's like, you're not even going to hear the song. We deserve time. And Derek's like, you don't deserve anything.

[18:08] Mo Brady: I barely know you. Calm down. Back up.

[18:12] Aaron Albano: Well, I thought that moment was particularly interesting, right? The full line was, no one deserves anything in this business. You wait your turn and you earn it.

[18:21] Mo Brady: I agree with half of that statement.

[18:23] Aaron Albano: Okay.

[18:24] Mo Brady: No one deserves anything in this business. Totally.

[18:26] Aaron Albano: Exactly.

[18:27] Mo Brady: Yep. We deserve to have the song listened to?

[18:31] Aaron Albano: No, you don't deserve anything in the business. However, I also don't agree that you wait your turn and you earn it. Sometimes people just get to the top. They get to the top on their own journey at their own speed, and their journey is not your journey, right?

[18:46] Mo Brady: Yes, agreed. Absolutely.

[18:48] Aaron Albano: I absolutely agree. Sometimes you are a fresh-faced boy from California, and you make your Broadway debut in Bombay Dreams.

[18:55] Mo Brady: Yes. No, Jimmy does not deserve anything, especially not being nice. But also, this business is not about waiting your turn. This business is about being in the right place at the right time and showing up being ultra prepared for opportunities.

[19:10] Aaron Albano: Yes.

[19:12] Mo Brady: I guess here's where the character of Jimmy turns me off when I feel like I should be rooting for him, is that when he gets in the person who's giving him the opportunity's face, how is that not a game over moment? Even if Tom Levitt comes back being like, yo, he's the real deal. Why isn't Derek like, yo, but he tried to hit me. Done.

[19:41] Aaron Albano: And so where does the push yourself forward end and the allow fortune to smile on you begin?

[19:48] Mo Brady: Yeah, he's just not very nice.

[19:50] Aaron Albano: No, he's garbage. The only time we've ever seen him be nice is when he was high in the...

[19:58] Mo Brady: Yeah, otherwise he's a monster.

[20:01] Aaron Albano: Yeah, maybe we'll fall in love with him later. I'm hoping because I don't remember hating Jimmy, but I do currently. Love Jeremy Jordan, hate Jimmy Collins.

[20:20] Mo Brady: To keep up to date with next week's recap, be sure to watch season two, episode five of Smash entitled The Readthrough. You can find Smash episodes on either the NBC app or on NBC.com.

[20:31] Aaron Albano: The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Mo Brady.

[20:34] Mo Brady: And by me, Aaron Albano. There are two great ways you can be helping The Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and two is by becoming a Patreon member.

[20:45] Aaron Albano: You can do that at patreon.com slash The Ensemblist. Follow The Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that be on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or at Broadway Podcast Network's home, bpn.fm. You can even find our own page.

[21:00] Mo Brady: Oh yeah, we have our own page at bpn.fm. You're a real boy, Aaron.

[21:04] Aaron Albano: And be sure to follow The Ensemblist on Instagram because things are changing all the time. Thanks for listening, guys. Until next time.