Smash (/Slings-and-Arrows-NPQiYBM)
Feb. 8th, 2012 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnCheer up, Hamlet; chin up, Hamlet; buck up, you melancholy Dane!
So your uncle is a cad who murdered Dad and married Mum.
That's really no excuse to be as glum as you've become!
So wise up, Hamlet; rise up, Hamlet; perk up and sing a new refrain.
Your incessant monologizing fills the castle with ennui.
Your antic disposition is embarrassing to see.
And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is to be!
You're driving poor Ophelia insane.
So shut up, you rogue and peasant; grow up, it's most unpleasant;
cheer up, you melancholy Dane!
Richard: Geoffrey, I am worried about the future of the entire festival. Now: what is the point of putting on a play if no one comes to see it?
Geoffrey: Which would you prefer: an empty house with a great play, or a full house with a piece of garbage?
Richard: GARBAGE! GARBAGE! I want GARBAGE!
Darren Nichols: I must say, I've fallen in love with the musical genre. It's the art-form of the common man. If you want to communicate something with the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It's noisy, vulgar and utterly meaningless—I love it!
Geoffrey: There will be struggle. There will be sacrifice. There will be tears, there will be the occasional fistfight. And in the end, there will be transformation.
-Slings and Arrows (assorted episodes)
You guys, I know I have talked about nothing else for months... I finally watched the pilot of Smash (it is on youtube and also on NBC's site) and just loved it. It's pretty clearly a not-particularly-deep soap opera, mind you, but a soap opera about Broadway WITH BROADWAY MUSIC; therefore, I loved it. (And I am incredibly bored by Glee.) Because, I guess, shows about serious putting-on-a-show really speak to me.
It isn't nearly as this is clearly really awesome as Slings and Arrows (from which all the above quotes are taken -- I could not pick just one) -- which you should all go watch right now, by the way; it's got the dialogue-and-humor awesomeness of the West Wing coupled with the creating-a-production themes of Smash as well as performances of Shakespeare. Smash has neither S&A's amazing dialogue and humor nor its deep treatment of performance themes (which is what I was really hoping for), and the Marilyn Monroe musical is fun but not particularly amazing (the Hamlet lyrics above are much more impressive than any of the Smash lyrics)... but the show speaks to the same parts of my psyche as S&A (it made me utterly bouncy to see how much all the characters clearly loved the musical world), and I actually liked it more than I liked the pilot of S&A, because the characters are more likeable, even if S&A's pilot impressed me a lot more.
There is some suspension of disbelief required to put Katherine McPhee on anything like the same plane in Broadway acting ability as Megan Hilty (who is gorgeous and wonderful and I just wanted to jump up and down every time she was on screen -- although to be perfectly fair her voice sounds a little hoarser than McPhee's, but it may just be an artifact of a naturally lower voice?). Hilty is perfectly, perfectly cast. Have I mentioned how much I adore her? Christian Borle was also perfectly cast. He gets to do a lot of very nice acting with a character who has his good points and bad points too -- it looks like he really has a much larger part than it looked like in the previews -- and he does not have to sing anything seriously, which is also a good thing. (But, since he's the songwriter, it looks like he will still get to sing on occasion, not seriously. Which is also a Good Thing.) Everyone else is really, really good, but I was really watching it for those two. (Although I never noticed before what a big nose Borle has!)
I loved Hilty's line "It was amazing getting the chance to work with you!" Just the way she says it, and her expression... it is totally clear what she means. Also, in breaking news, I love Hilty.
I WANT MORE HILTY/MCPHEE DUETS please thanks.
I am so pleased that the love interest gets to be a non-white boy!
Also, ahahahaha Spider-man jokes!
Why random house boy is in all the audition scenes, I DO NOT KNOW. That was the one extremely jarring note for me.
So, definitely going to keep watching it. It could get better, and it could also get a lot worse (especially if they start piling on the cliches -- there were definite directions that way in the pilot). We'll see.
(Also... I have to go back now to S&A and watch Richard Smith-Jones! And Anna! And Geoffrey Tennant! And who could forget Darren! It's been too long.)
So your uncle is a cad who murdered Dad and married Mum.
That's really no excuse to be as glum as you've become!
So wise up, Hamlet; rise up, Hamlet; perk up and sing a new refrain.
Your incessant monologizing fills the castle with ennui.
Your antic disposition is embarrassing to see.
And by the way, you sulky brat, the answer is to be!
You're driving poor Ophelia insane.
So shut up, you rogue and peasant; grow up, it's most unpleasant;
cheer up, you melancholy Dane!
Richard: Geoffrey, I am worried about the future of the entire festival. Now: what is the point of putting on a play if no one comes to see it?
Geoffrey: Which would you prefer: an empty house with a great play, or a full house with a piece of garbage?
Richard: GARBAGE! GARBAGE! I want GARBAGE!
Darren Nichols: I must say, I've fallen in love with the musical genre. It's the art-form of the common man. If you want to communicate something with the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It's noisy, vulgar and utterly meaningless—I love it!
Geoffrey: There will be struggle. There will be sacrifice. There will be tears, there will be the occasional fistfight. And in the end, there will be transformation.
-Slings and Arrows (assorted episodes)
You guys, I know I have talked about nothing else for months... I finally watched the pilot of Smash (it is on youtube and also on NBC's site) and just loved it. It's pretty clearly a not-particularly-deep soap opera, mind you, but a soap opera about Broadway WITH BROADWAY MUSIC; therefore, I loved it. (And I am incredibly bored by Glee.) Because, I guess, shows about serious putting-on-a-show really speak to me.
It isn't nearly as this is clearly really awesome as Slings and Arrows (from which all the above quotes are taken -- I could not pick just one) -- which you should all go watch right now, by the way; it's got the dialogue-and-humor awesomeness of the West Wing coupled with the creating-a-production themes of Smash as well as performances of Shakespeare. Smash has neither S&A's amazing dialogue and humor nor its deep treatment of performance themes (which is what I was really hoping for), and the Marilyn Monroe musical is fun but not particularly amazing (the Hamlet lyrics above are much more impressive than any of the Smash lyrics)... but the show speaks to the same parts of my psyche as S&A (it made me utterly bouncy to see how much all the characters clearly loved the musical world), and I actually liked it more than I liked the pilot of S&A, because the characters are more likeable, even if S&A's pilot impressed me a lot more.
There is some suspension of disbelief required to put Katherine McPhee on anything like the same plane in Broadway acting ability as Megan Hilty (who is gorgeous and wonderful and I just wanted to jump up and down every time she was on screen -- although to be perfectly fair her voice sounds a little hoarser than McPhee's, but it may just be an artifact of a naturally lower voice?). Hilty is perfectly, perfectly cast. Have I mentioned how much I adore her? Christian Borle was also perfectly cast. He gets to do a lot of very nice acting with a character who has his good points and bad points too -- it looks like he really has a much larger part than it looked like in the previews -- and he does not have to sing anything seriously, which is also a good thing. (But, since he's the songwriter, it looks like he will still get to sing on occasion, not seriously. Which is also a Good Thing.) Everyone else is really, really good, but I was really watching it for those two. (Although I never noticed before what a big nose Borle has!)
I loved Hilty's line "It was amazing getting the chance to work with you!" Just the way she says it, and her expression... it is totally clear what she means. Also, in breaking news, I love Hilty.
I WANT MORE HILTY/MCPHEE DUETS please thanks.
I am so pleased that the love interest gets to be a non-white boy!
Also, ahahahaha Spider-man jokes!
Why random house boy is in all the audition scenes, I DO NOT KNOW. That was the one extremely jarring note for me.
So, definitely going to keep watching it. It could get better, and it could also get a lot worse (especially if they start piling on the cliches -- there were definite directions that way in the pilot). We'll see.
(Also... I have to go back now to S&A and watch Richard Smith-Jones! And Anna! And Geoffrey Tennant! And who could forget Darren! It's been too long.)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-09 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-10 02:47 pm (UTC)