The producers of “Bombshell,” which was just announced as heading into development as a Broadway musical, are tempting fate. Not only are the first four letters like a red flag to wave in front of critics, but the show has as its central character no less an icon than Marilyn Monroe, who continues to be a ghostly presence casting a giant shadow more than fifty years after her death. However, “Bombshell” on Broadway seemed almost inevitable from the moment Scott Wittman suggested that a musical about Marilyn Monroe be the centerpiece of “Smash,” a television series about a group of starry-eyed aspirants putting on a Broadway musical. The NBC-TV series, produced by Steven Spielberg, Neil Meron, and Craig Zadan, failed to live up to its promise, expiring after two seasons. But the series attracted a rabid fan base, especially for the songs by Wittman and Marc Shaiman (“Hairspray”) that were written for the show-within-the-show. The fans were out in full force on June 8 when the cast of “Smash” reunited for a one-night-only charity benefit singing the songs of “Bombshell,” and the ecstatic response moved the needle toward a full-fledged musical production. “No matter what you say about Marilyn Monroe, she is one of the most potent figures of our time, and there’s no diminishing of it,” Robert Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment told the New York Times. “It just is an endlessly fascinating life and story, and we think there’s something to harness there.”Indeed there have been more than 200 books written about the enduring film legend and it will be an Everest-like challenge to write a libretto to weave around Wittman and Shaiman’s compelling score. In the scenario for “Smash,” created by veteran playwright Theresa Rebeck, two actresses, played by Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee, vied to be cast as Marilyn Monroe in “Bombshell.” They alternately sang such songs as “Let Me Be Your Star,” “The National Pastime,” “The Twentieth Century Fox Mambo,” and “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” as the musical followed the romantic adventures of the blonde film goddess. (A first-season soundtrack, “The Music of Smash,” was released as a CD in 2012.) For the June 8 charity concert, which raised over $800,000 for the Actors Fund, photos, videos, and readings from Monroe’s storied life were integrated among the splashy numbers choreographed by Joshua Bergasse.Zadan and Meron are among the savviest of producers whose impressive credits range over feature films (the Oscar-winning “Chicago”), television (“The Sound of Music Live!”), and Broadway (the hit revivals of “How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying” and “Promises, Promises’). But they are under no illusions about the difficulty of the task at hand. “Marilyn: An American Fable,” a 1983 musical about Monroe, closed quickly at the Minksoff Theatre — ironically, the same theater at which the June charity concert took place.“What we start with is one of the greatest scores…so it’s a pretty auspicious beginning to combine that score with a story about a beloved icon,” Meron said shortly after the concert. “But that’s easier said that done.”“I think it really needs a conceptual point of view and somebody who can write this who has a vision how to make it so it’s not a biography,” Zadan added.What the production team also has in their favor is a fan base of millions who took the series to heart despite the dismal ratings. The situation is not dissimilar to the context in which the hit Broadway musical “Newsies” was created out of a 1992 Disney film flop. That movie, starring a young Christian Bale, was a bomb at the box-office, but the score by Jack Feldman and Alan Menken cultivated passionate fans over the succeeding decades. Disney had planned to exploit the subsidiary rights by adapting it into a musical and was caught by surprise when a tryout at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse garnered strong reviews. The transfer to Broadway became inevitable, the fans showed up in throngs, and a long run and several Tony Awards followed.The producers of “Bombshell” should only be so lucky.
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