Smash actor Jack Davenport really wants the live Bombshell musical to run on Broadway
Jack Davenport would love for Broadway to let Bombshell be its star.
While sitting down with the EW studio at the SCAD Atlanta TV festival this past weekend alongside his costars from The Accused, Davenport confessed he had no updates on a potential Smash live musical coming to Broadway other than his own abundant enthusiasm. Namely because he recognizes he likely would not be part of it.
"I'm the only member of the original Smash cast who cannot sing a note," he quips, before adding. "They did make me sing in one episode, and then promptly never asked me to sing again."
But Davenport is eager for the show's musical-within-a-musical to make it to the Great White Way, if for no other reason than its score. "The idea that in every episode you had a new original song that was then built on top of another and then another and you saw this whole show take shape [was brilliant]," he says. "Those Shaiman and Wittman songs are such great numbers, it would be a shame to not seem them in a fully realized production."
Will Hart/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images Katharine McPhee as Karen Cartwright, Jack Davenport as Derek Wills in 'SMASH'
Over the course of its two seasons on NBC, Smash followed the creation of fictional Broadway musical, Bombshell, all about the life and career of Marilyn Monroe. Davenport starred as womanizing director Derek Wills, who struggled to choose between buxom Ivy (Megan Hilty) and fresh face Karen (Katharine McPhee) in the hunt for his leading lady.
In conceiving of a real Broadway production of Bombshell, Davenport also comes up against the central conflict of the TV show — who should play Marilyn? But he's far more circumspect than the man he played.
"Megan and Kat both fought valiantly for that role in the show, and I'd like to see one or both of them do it, but I don't know who would do it," he says, before his Accused costar Rachel Bilson presses him on whether or not he has a frontrunner himself. "I might have a favorite, but I'm not going to say it on camera."
In 2015, a one-night only concert production of Bombshell generated enough interest from fans that it was announced that producers would investigate developing it for the stage. And the idea seemed to have legs. They already had a Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman score, they just needed a book writer.
Then, in 2020, the idea received further support, following a Zoom Smash reunion and airing of the sold-out 2015 concert. Since then, no further word has come on whether or not they might continue adapting the story for the stage.
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