A New "Smile" Lights up off-Broadway
J2 Spotlight shines a spotlight on Howard Ashman and Marvin Hamlisch's lost show
In the midst of the snowstorm* of shows that has descended upon New York in the last month, you’d be forgiven if you missed hearing about something special. And for the next four more days something unique and special is happening at the AMT Theatre on 45th Street. The J2 Spotlight Musical Theatre Company is presenting Smile, the 1986 Alan Menken/Marvin Hamlisch about a California high school beauty pageant.
J2 is dedicated to presenting rarely seen or lost shows, and Smile most certainly fits the bill. Originally directed by Ashman, the show managed only 48 performances before closing on January 3, 1987—and according to cast member Mana Allen and company manager Randy Gindi, who did a talkback with theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper after the show—even that was more than they expected. “The closing notice kept going up on Tuesday” announcing the end of the run that weekend, Allen explained, and then the show would get extended and it would come down.**
Watching the first act of the show, directed by J2’s Artistic Director and co-founder Robert W. Schneider, you can see exactly why the Broadway run kept getting extended. Between Hamlisch’s infectious music, Ashman’s crisp lyrics, and the wonderful, wide-eyed characters, it’s clear just how much life and potential there is to Smile. In fact, as I watched the cast of a dozen pageant contenders and their adult handlers not only singing but dancing on the tiny AMT stage with such great energy and precision—Caitlin Belcik does the choreography, and it is wonderful—I felt like I was seeing a show every high school in the country should be doing. Even decades on from its creation, Smile has such a palpable sense of what it feels like to be young and not quite know who you are or where you belong but also wanting something so bad.
Here’s Donna Marie Elio Asbury, who covered for Jodi Benson as co-lead Doria, singing “Disneyland” from the show, with Hamlisch on piano.
Then Act II begins and in short order one contestant has slipped a naked photo of another contestant into the beauty pageant’s opening slide show; the pageant organizer, afraid of having to stop the show and lose her standing with the pageant’s national CEO, blames the slide on the girl herself; and the girl leaves in shame, never to return.
In a word: Yikes.
Add in the fact that the girl mistreated is of Mexican descent, while the white girl who has done this to her (along with the pageant coordinator’s super-creepy tween son) is never punished or even sought after, in fact no one gets a comeuppance of any kind, and you get some sense of why Smile doesn’t often get produced.
During the talkback, Gindi shared that Ashman had actually brought in Tommy Tune and Michael Bennett on subsequent nights of previews, looking for suggestions on how to fix the story issues. “I wasn’t in the room, but I’m told that Tommy and Michael gave completely opposite advice,” Gindi shared. “One of them said you have to make this more real, the other one said you have to make it more satirical,” as the movie Smile on which the musical was based had done.
But it seems that Ashman was unable to pull the trigger either way, and watching the J2 production, in some ways I can appreciate why. Anchored by the endearing characters Doria and Robin (played at J2 by Bridget Delaney and Sophie Stromberg), what makes the first act so winning is the overall innocence of its characters and their story. To add a layer of satire early might have helped the events of the second act go down more smoothly, but it doesn’t sit terribly well on those lead characters. The photo is also so brutally real, almost pornographic, it doesn’t really feel like it fits in the world of a satire, either.
While the show was still being developed, Hamlisch and Ashman spoke to Bob Fosse about coming on board, and taped the conversation. One of Fosse’s first questions was whether the photo reveal doesn’t belong at the end of Act I. “Are you sure you have the act curtain in the right place?,” he asked. “It seems like traditionally it’d be the nude photograph and the chaos.”
Ashman insisted it had to be where it was because, he said, “I don’t have enough to come after it. I have no second act.” In fact, I think that feeling is largely a function of their decision to remove the humiliated girl from the story and have the other young women, including the two main characters, not acknowledge what they’re all just witnessed and the questions it begs about what they’re doing. As audience, we definitely needed the intermission to process the fact that the story we’re watching is not the one we thought.
“I always felt like it might have been better if someone else had directed the show,” Allen said at the talkback last week, “and Howard could have just written and taken in all of the details, because it was exhausting him—he was directing and going home and rewriting at the same time.”
“Although he had done all three before for Little Shop of Horrors a few years before,” Gindi said, listing Ashman’s work there as director, on lyrics and book, “this was a much bigger project. I think it was kind of overwhelming him.”
Ashman and Hamlisch.
In fact, as the Disney documentary Howard points out, Smile was Ashman’s first show on Broadway. And it faced obstacles all the way along. Having backed the show up to a point in the development process, the Shubert Company and David Geffen ended up walking away. Ashman’s partner Bill Hauck shared, “I don’t know what it was that scared David and the Shubert organization away, they didn’t tell Howard, but it hurt him.” Ashman’s sister Sarah Gillespie agreed: “Understanding there was a great deal of money to be lost, but still I think to him it felt disloyal.”
The exit of Geffen and the Shuberts left Hamlisch and Ashman scrambling to find new backers. Jodi Benson, who played Doria, remembered the change that brought in them: “You could definitely see the shift of pressure really going on to Marvin and Howard, and a lot more of the arguing between the two of them.”
No doubt to build buzz for the show, Ashman and Hamlisch agreed to grant Diane Sawyer access to the rehearsal and development process for an entire year leading up to the Broadway production. And you can feel the pressure the two must have been under simply in the way Sawyer begins her 60 Minutes piece about Smile: “It’s been six years since Marvin Hamlisch’s last hit on Broadway, in a business where you’re only as good as your last hit,” Sawyer opines as Hamlisch works with the cast on a song.
Of Ashman, she says, “Though he’s had a hit musical off-Broadway, this is his first and maybe his only shot at the big time.” Woof.
In the end, the show would be dead on arrival from its opening night reviews. Frank Rich in the New York Times described it as “Schizoid in tone, dramatically diffuse and undistinguished in such crucial areas as music, dance and humor.” Said Rich, “There are many worse reasons to put on a show than sheer love of the musical’s happier past. But if the spirit is willing in ‘Smile,’ the execution is weak.”
In the Ashman documentary, Benson remembers, “I truly don’t think I saw Marvin again. He just became reclusive and disappeared.” The loss crushed Ashman, as well. But that failure would also lead to some of Ashman’s greatest successes. Jeffrey Katzenberg had been courting Ashman to come to Los Angeles and write for Disney animation. (Ashman’s sister tells the story of Katzenberg calling during the Ashman family Passover seder after Smile closed and asking Howard, “Well? When are you going to sign? Come on.”)
Feeling the need to get out of New York after Smile, Ashman said yes. And before he died in 1991, he’d go on to write The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and three of the songs in Aladdin, all with his Little Shop collaborator Alan Menken. And each of those would eventually become hits on Broadway. (And in the Mermaid animated movie, Benson would be their Ariel.)
In their conversation with Fosse, Hamlisch explains how the show had changed since Ashman came on board as book writer and lyricist (having replaced Carolyn Leigh after she sadly died of a heart attack). “This show was more than a beauty pageant,” Hamlisch said he now realized. “There was something at the spine of the whole American Dream that was starting to be clawed at.”
Hamlisch compared it to the first time he got to play at the Boston Pops. “Wait till you see the dressing room of John Williams or whomever,” he remembers thinking. “You feel glamorous and gorgeous….That to me is what the show is about.…there’s this pageant, these gorgeous girls, this incorruptible thing, and meanwhile we’re seeing it all,” i.e. the ways these girls and adults are selling themselves and each other out. Ashman, who deeply desired to get the show up before Ronald Reagan left office, described it as “this celebration of Republicanism.”
While nothing political is ever directly mentioned, the hard turns of that second act capture so much of the darkness that underlie so much of Reagan’s “ Morning again in America.” And it’s impossible to leave the J2 production without feeling a quiet devastation that Ashman and Menken’s critique is only more relevant today.
For more information on J2’s production of Smile, which runs through April 20th, or its upcoming production of Zorba! and Drat the Cat!, click here.
Smile is licensed by Concord Theatricals.
* It may be April 17th, but space heaters are still going every night around the city, God help us.
**At the talkback Allen told the story of finding out in the midst of a snowstorm on New Year’s Eve that she was going to go in for Anne Marie Bobby as lead Robin Benson. But because the closing kept getting announced, they had never done the understudy rehearsals. “I had been with the show two years, I knew what was going on,” Allen said, but still it was daunting. Jodi Benson and music director Paul Gemignani came in early and they went through the whole show. “And Howard Ashman and his partner Bill drove in a snowstorm from their country house just to come and support me.”