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SMASH!

Menier Theatre, Outer London
From: Thursday, 24th March 2011
To: Sunday, 8 May 2011

Our Review: starstarstar Your Reviews: starstar

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Synopsis

Comic but scathing look at the journey to get a musical from page to stage, complete with a cantankerous composer, a fantasist lyricist, a neophyte female novelist turned playwright, a cocksure director and a bombastic producer.

Our Review: starstarstar

Michael Coveney - 1 April 2011

Smash! folded on the road in 1981, the late television dramatist Jack Rosenthal’s only stage play, and even that’s putting it strongly. It’s a fairly enjoyable theatrical indulgence about the making of a musical in chaotic circumstances that stutters into town, has a rhapsodic first night and is then killed stone dead by reviews.

What actually happened was that Rosenthal’s television play, Bar Mitzvah Boy, was turned into a 1978 musical of the same name – lyrics by Don Black, music by Jule Styne, composer of Gypsy and Funny Girl – and folded after 77 performances at Her Majesty’s.

It was an enjoyable failure, believe me, with some good writing and a delightful cast including Joyce Blair, Vivienne Martin, Harry Towb, Sharon Lee Hill and Ray C Davis. It simply ran out of oomph, luck and money, and lacked killer punch.

In Smash! the show in question is an even worse sounding romant...

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Latest User Review

Love the MCF normally. - 9 May 2011: star

Thought Tom Conti was good, and the waitress was super, but thought that otherwise the first half was so boring and wooden (sorry) that we - for the first time ever, having paid good money for the ticket - actually left at the interval feeling that we couldn't stand any more. Terribly disappointed as we go to all the Chocolate Factory shows and normally love them all, but not this one....

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