Broadway Rant: When Broadway does TV and movies.

I love Broadway so much. So much. And because I love it so much, I am willing to go to a lot of mediocre regional theater in order to see plays I have never seen before, like Aida, The Secret Garden, and The Drowsy Chaperone, to name a few. I have accepted the fact that I do not live in a city with culture, and I make the best of it. You'd think I'd be thrilled about a TV show about a Broadway show with actual Broadway stars in it. I am not.

The show is called Smash, and I watched the pilot with great expectations. It is the story of a group of people developing a musical, from the first idea ("Let's make a musical about Marilyn Monroe!") to the production. I thoroughly enjoyed the pilot. That enjoyment pretty much stopped after about the second or third episode, not because the plotting got ridiculous, or the characters were written as idiots. No, here's why I gave up on Smash:

Hollywood and Broadway are weird together. Weird things happen when musicals are made into movies. Namely, they often cast Hollywood actors to play roles that originated on Broadway, and, often, those Hollywood people can't sing. Okay, let me rephrase that: those Hollywood people can't sing like Broadway people. For the most part, they do fine. I liked Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia (I liked Pierce Brosnan a lot less, though). And there are people who argue persuasively that, when you are singing in a movie, you want to be more subtle, so you don't go for the big Broadway belt. Fine. I can accept that for, say, Anne Hathaway as Fantine in the upcoming Les Miz movie. I will accept that it is technically correct for a dying Fantine to have a weak voice at that moment. I don't expect Patti LuPone (okay, I do, but I get that moviegoers do not).

In the 50's and 60's, they bypassed what we will call the Pierce Brosnan Problem by hiring actors who couldn't sing and dubbing other people's voices for the musical numbers. Marni Nixon, for example, was the uncredited singing voice for Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Deborah Kerr in King and I, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (in a role that Julie Andrews originated-tell me she's not screen friendly). I don't know if people back then were easily fooled, or just didn't care. These days, though, directors expect actors to sing their own parts, even if someone else would do a better job, which often leads to mediocre singing in movie musicals.

The recent exception to this is Rent, which was made into a movie a few years ago with almost the entire original cast Broadway, including Taye Diggs, who could have easily been mistaken for man-candy stunt casting. In fact, the entire original Broadway cast of Rent was exceptionally good-looking. Typically, though, by the time a musical is made into a movie, the original cast is too old to play the same roles they played years earlier (case in point, Phantom of the Opera, which was made into a movie 18 years after its original debut in London). Or someone in charge of the movie decides it would be better with a more well-known movie entity, like Justin Timberlake or Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Speaking of Phantom, before the long-anticipated movie was made, rumors flew that celebrity casting would take over the production. Names like John Travolta (I know, right?) and Antonio Banderas (gasp!) were thrown around. In the end, the director decided to cast young, relatively unknown actors. While they did well casting Patrick Wilson, an already two-time Tony Award nominee, but relatively unknown in movies at that point, as Raoul, they cast Gerard Butler as the Phantom, which most people thought was bad move, as the Phantom was supposed to be a musical genius, and Butler had something like four singing lessons prior to his audition. I, too, questioned the casting choice at first, but, upon revisiting the movie, I have decided I kind of like the Phantom with a rougher voice, particularly when juxtaposed against a voice like Wilson's, which is an incredible, traditional Broadway lyric tenor.

As a Broadway fan who does not get to see many Broadway plays, I would really appreciate Hollywood's efforts to cast leads who can actually sing, rather than casting people who react to the leads as if they can sing. Get it together, Smash.