That detail and depth wound up working against Martin and Elice’s perfect ending. In 2024, their workshop version of Smash was presented for the firs
That detail and depth wound up working against Martin and Elice’s perfect ending. In 2024, their workshop version of Smash was presented for the first time before an audience at Hunter College. “What we encountered when we had an audience last year,” Elice says, “was that the people loved Robyn so much that they hated the show for killing her.” Even worse, “the last 20 minutes of the show didn’t have her in it.”
They tried to make it work anyway, at first, by cobbling together a reason for Hurder to reappear. “We were, like, did she come in as a ghost?” Martin says. “It was never entirely satisfactory.”
So finally, Martin and Elice reworked their reworking. “We were pumping Act Two full of comedy, and we were constantly adjusting the mechanics of the ending,” Martin says. “Not only the death of Ivy, but the scene that followed was rewritten extensively. And then the one original song in the show, ‘Smash,’ was rewritten over and over and over again.”
Finally, they landed on a recent conclusion. Instead of literally dying onstage, we’d see Ivy “die” as Marilyn Monroe in Bombshell, the musical within the musical. And that ending would be received so poorly it would sink Bombshell entirely. Smash still ends with its characters rallying to write a show about their terrible experience making Bombshell—but this time, Ivy’s still alive to play herself.
In the final iteration of Smash, the moment lands. But it works even better when you know that Martin and Elice channeled their frustration about how the original ending was received into this recent kicker. After Marilyn’s death, we see dozens of livid social media posts that blast Bombshell for finishing on such a down note. Even Julie Andrews hates it. None of the comments were actually taken from workshop audiences—but only because “it would’ve been too obscene if we literally used what people said,” Elice says with a laugh. “Because they said, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ Which we changed to, ‘Well, that was bleak.’”
The goal of a confection like Smash is to send people into the streets smiling and humming “Let Me Be Your Star”—not to smack them in the face, then lower the curtain. And though they’ve still got affection for their original ending, Elice and Martin are generally joyful with the way Smash’s final form has been received. “Not everybody liked it,” Martin says. “And we got some bad reviews. We also got lots of people on social media baffled by what they had just seen. But largely, the proof is in the pudding. And every night, people are really, really, really laughing. That’s the test of a comedy.”
Perhaps even more impressively, both had a great time working on Smash. “The show that we were creating was about creatives who could barely speak to each other,” Martin says. But he, Elice, Shaiman, Wittman, director Susan Stroman, and the rest of the Smash team worked together beautifully. “Maybe because we were able to put it into the show, it never happened with us,” Elice says. “No one ever walked out of the room and disappeared for a week. There were no Arthur Laurents moments where he goes in at night and slashes the scenery. There were no trap doors left open for people to fall through.”
Now that the experience is in the rearview, both have several more irons in the fire. Martin is working on an adaptation of the 2004 film Millions; the pair is preparing to workshop a top-secret recent collaboration this fall. But any Smash-ochist would be pleased to know that they’re also not ruling out the possibility of writing a show about writing Smash. “That’s a show I would pay to see,” Martin says. “It would just be overwhelmingly meta. It would be the Inception of musicals.”
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