Theresa Rebeck (Emily Anne Epstein for The Observer)

The NBC drama Smash, returning for its second season early next year, offered a backstage look at a fictional Broadway production. Much of the show’s dramatic tension involved the musical’s writers’ effort to tell an honest story in the face of intense market pressure.

Creator Theresa Rebeck didn’t realize it at the time, but she was also writing her own epitaph as the program’s showrunner.

Like the Broadway musical at its center, Smash was also subject to intense commercial forces. The first season’s finale, in which the newly minted star belts a tune called “Don’t Forget Me,” turned out to be Ms. Rebeck’s last episode. Her departure was announced in March.

She rebounded quickly. By June, Ms. Rebeck, a prominent playwright—her Mauritius ran on Broadway in 2007 and her Seminar in 2011—was headed back to the Great White Way with a new play, Dead Accounts, which opens Thursday at the Music Box Theatre. The story of a Cincinnati family dealing with the ghosts of the past, its production boasts a rather Smash-ian twist: it's the second Broadway production starring Katie Holmes.

Ms. Holmes is in the midst of a comeback of her own, having just survived the biggest and most contentious celebrity divorce of the past decade. That she’s chosen a serious turn on Broadway as her next chapter is particularly interesting, in that she is largely playing a supporting role.

“They just have to be able to act,” Ms. Rebeck said of casting celebrities. “I understand why it’s important to theaters to have actors of some visibility. I do. They just have to be really careful that it’s somebody that can do the part.”

Ms. Holmes’s character, Lorna, is quiet, small and very Midwestern, a compulsive dieter who receives a visit by her brother (played by two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz), back in town after a mysteriously lucrative time in New York.

It’s a little like Ms. Rebeck’s own experience, in fact—a quick return to the theater after her no doubt well-compensated, if creatively bruising, brush with prime-time television.

Smash, it should be noted, wasn’t just any show. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, who had been developing the idea for years, it came with a reality-TV twist: if the musical within a series was deemed worthy, it would actually be produced on Broadway (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). The pilot, which is said to have cost NBC $7.5 million to produce, was heavily promoted during the Super Bowl. It was an event.

Reviews and ratings were solid, at first. But both began to take a negative turn as the weeks went on.

The problems on Smash, Ms. Rebeck said, stemmed from producers’ demands that the characters behave in ways their creator thought incoherent.

“One of the points of contention last year was that the network thinks they have the right to say to the writer of the show, ‘We don’t want her to do this. We want her to do this,’” Ms. Rebeck recalled. “And I would sometimes say back to them, ‘She would never do that.’ And they’d look at me like I was crazy, and I’d be like, ‘Nope, it’s not crazy, it’s just who the character is.’ You have to respect who the character is. It has its own internal truth and you can’t betray that. And if you don’t betray that, it will not betray you. There is this sort of sense that if you don’t fuck with the muse—if you don’t fuck with the muse, the muse will stand by you."

Ms. Rebeck compared her function on Smash to that of an architect, but noted that NBC viewed her more as a general contractor. “If they say, ‘Take the wall out,’ and you say, ‘I can’t take the wall out, the building will fall down’—but they don’t want to hear that! It turns into bigger questions about power and art, power and storytelling. Is power itself bigger than storytelling? And I would say no.”

Hardly an innocent when it comes to negotiating the tricky terrain of art and commerce, Ms. Rebeck was an Emmy nominee as a producer of NYPD Blue, and has plenty of experience balancing the dictates of the muse with the demands of network suits. “The better executives understand that there’s supposed to be tension and respect, but a lot of them are just like ‘Do it. You don’t own it. Just do it.’ That’s not a level playing field; you can’t have a true discussion. You just get a lot of money. Everybody has to make those choices. Absolutely everybody. Sometimes I see movies and go, ‘Oh. Ew. Did Julia Roberts need another $20 million? Because it’s the only reason she would be doing that.’ Why did that person do that? It must be for the money.”

Dead Accounts, which is set in Ms. Rebeck’s hometown of Cincinnati and was first produced in that city’s Playhouse in the Park, is about people rather like Ms. Rebeck’s family—or even herself, had she not made an early escape (she compared herself to Ms. Holmes’s character, who is less brilliant than hard-working). Both siblings deal with an ailing father, perpetually vacillating in health offstage, a meddling, overbearing mother who just wants everyone to be happy (played by Jayne Houdyshell), and shared memories that mean far more to sister than to brother. He’s left the region behind and would prefer not to be back at all.

Though Ms. Rebeck has a fondness for certain aspects of the Midwest, she came to the East Coast for college, attending Brandeis, and soon wound up in New York: “I really was the person who was desperate to get out of Ohio on some level,” she said.

The politics seem to have been especially grating—the abortion issue, for instance. “Somehow people got sold this bill of goods that as long as you are pro-life and other people are pro-choice, that gives you a sort of moral superiority,” she said. “You don’t have to think of anything else.”

Growing up, she said, she never quite fit in. “I was not really ‘of that place,’” she explained. “Then I came to New York, and I don’t really feel of this place either, though there’s certainly much more here that suits my temperament.”

Her temperament also lands her between two poles artistically—more pragmatic than most Pulitzer-nominated playwrights, yet artsier than many TV showrunners. “In the theater, it’s a kind of clubby environment,” she noted. “I didn’t go to an Ivy League. There’s a thing in New York: ‘Did you go to an Ivy?’ ‘Did you go to Yale?’ “Oh, you’re from the Midwest.’ ‘Oh, you’re a girl.’” With advanced degrees from Brandeis and limited interest in postmodernism and other dramaturgical trends, Ms. Rebeck felt out of place in the city, where she’d arrived with her then-boyfriend, now-husband in tow (he’s from Kansas).

“There were a lot of obstacles to overcome,” she went on, “but people seemed to respond to my plays. There was a place for them, but not really a place for me.”

Did it hurt her prospects, this outsider status?

“No,” she said. “It hurt my feelings. It didn’t hurt my career.”

Ms. Rebeck is very conscious of Eastern snobbery. Her family, her characters and her star (Ms. Holmes is from Toledo, a jaunt up I-75) all come in for mockery from pretentious city slickers.

“[Midwesterners] see the culture—and I have to say I don’t think they’re wrong about this aspect of it—as kind of degrading,” she said. “The way sexuality is portrayed, so much violence, the carelessness. I respect their impatience with that aspect of the culture. At one point I said to my husband, the networks would put kiddie porn on if they were allowed.” (Ah, for those halcyon days when a glimpse of Det. Andy Sipowicz’s butt was deemed risqué ...)

Smash is hardly kiddie porn, but it did represent Midwesterners as rubes and New Yorkers as savvy: when the show’s protagonist of sorts, Karen Cartwright—who’s utterly blind to the dynamics of power that run the theater world and New York in general—returns home to Iowa, she’s greeted by parents who ever-so-gently try to crush her dreams. While Ms. Rebeck noted that the show was never intended to focus so heavily on Karen (played by Katharine McPhee), she added, “People found her to be a very attractive character, so they asked me to write that. I was okay with it. I was like, I’ve got that in my back pocket.”

Kaufman Astoria Studios.

Though the city has disallowed exterior shooting until Friday at the earliest in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, at least one studio is back open. Kaufman Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens, is planning to welcome the crews of Showtime's Nurse Jackie and Netflix's Orange is the New Black tomorrow, though the studio was open today as well.

"We're no different than any other business. And all your favorite shows will be on the air and won't miss a beat," said studio president Hal Rosenbluth, noting that the outer-borough institution did lose a couple of banners. "We weathered the storm better than I ever would have dreamt. Our building is more than 90 years old. They don't build them the way they used to!"

Mr. Rosenbluth speculated that shows would adjust their shooting schedule in order to shoot weeks' worth of interior shots at a time and pick up exteriors once the mayor's office had cleared it, noting that wiggle room was built into TV shows' schedules. "They have some room for the what-if. What if an actor gets sick?"

The studio was open today, sans the lighting crew, who were allowed to stay home given that there were no shows for them to light.

Meanwhile, NBC representatives tell The Observer that 30 Rock went back into production today, with Smash and the upcoming series Deception starting tomorrow, and Law and Order: SVU playing it by ear but still on shooting hiatus.

UPDATE, 11/1/2012: 666 Park Avenue, the New York-set show shot at Cine Magic Riverfront Studios in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, reportedly suffered damage to its sets after flooding, with the head of Cine Magic suggesting it could be three weeks before the show returns to filming. Sources connected to the show told The Observer that no date has been set or suggested internally, and that producers are still assessing the damages but that the production office is running.

Meanwhile, shows including Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show With David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel's jaunt to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week have resumed filming.

Sean Hayes (Getty Images)

Emmy-winning actor Sean Hayes will be joining the second season of NBC's musical comedy(?) Smash, a show that is already best known as a punchline on 30 Rock. Can the Will & Grace star save the show from campy demise?

Joining former co-star Debra Messing, Mr. Hayes (best known to the world as Will & Grace's Jack, or possibly the voice of the evil Mr. Tinkles from Cats & Dogs) has an uphill battle in order to help save Smash from its slumping numbers, which fell off after a much-touted premiere.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

Hayes will play Terrence Falls, a comedic TV and film star who is making his Broadway debut in the musical Liaisons, based on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. However, due to a series of comedic circumstances, he becomes a thorn in the side of Megan Hilty's Ivy and other characters.

First of all ... a musical version of Dangerous Liaisons is hysterical already. We wonder how many Cruel Intentions jokes will be cracked in Mr. Hayes' first episode. (Answer: a lot, probably.)

Secondly, we're looking forward to seeing how Newsies' Jeremy Jordan will hold up opposite Mr. Hayes, as well as finding out who the final replacement lead—known only as a "African American female chorus member"—will be.

Jeremy Jordan, Newsie, will be joining the cast of 'Smash'

Smash, the NBC Monday night show that will be going on to a second season despite all evidence that it should have been canceled three episodes in, is getting a new star. Jeremy Jordan, currently starring in Broadway's Newsies, will be joining the cast of Smash, helping replace Jaime Cepero and Raza Jaffrey and Brian D’Arcy James (Ellis, Dev, and Frank, respectively), who are leaving the show.

According to TVLine.com:

His character is one of three roles being added under new showrunner Josh Safran. The other newbies, a gay male Broadway dreamer and an African-American female chorus member, have yet to be cast.

No word yet on who Mr.Jordan will be portraying in the new season, but our guess is that he'll be playing Danny, described as "a straight, working class fella in his mid-20s and from Brooklyn. He is summed up as 'sexy, charismatic and musically gifted, but also self-destructive and remote.'"

Robert Greenblatt and Jennifer Salke (Getty Images)

After brief remarks from NBC broadcasting chairman Ted Harbert, NBC's upfront presentation to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall kicked off with the two stars of Smash, Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee, singing (or lip-synching--the exact notes sounded terrifically familiar) the series's signature song, "Let Me Be Your Star," while the red chairs from The Voice loomed behind them. All four chairs eventually turned around (The Voice's symbol for a song successfully executed) and Voice stars Christina Aguilera, Cee-Lo Green, and Adam Levine were seated, along with NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt.

The whole to-do was a symbol of just what significance NBC has placed upon its musical series on Monday nights, a night on which the ailing network has finally become competitive. "The number one goal," said Mr. Greenblatt, "is to attach Tuesday and Wednesday nights"--a mission, hinging upon momentum carried from night-to-night, that seemed at odds with Mr. Harbert's remarks.

"We can no longer afford to ignore time-shifting," Mr. Harbert had said, urging the audience of ad buyers to take into account a show's performance on DVR over seven days. He also implied NBC's season finish (it will either be fourth or, thanks to its broadcast of the Super Bowl, third) was the result of a broken system that takes only a season, and not the summer, into account. It may not be coincidental that Mr. Harbert's call for a year-round measure of network success comes before NBC's Olympic broadcast this summer.

"We are in a photo finish for number 3--not number 4," said Mr. Greenblatt, and noted that the network was doubling down on comedies while putting out a final 13 episodes for consistently low-rated 30 Rock. Those ten comedies on air in the fall are to include Animal Practice, about (per NBC entertainment president, recently recruited by Mr. Greenblatt, Jennifer Salke) "a sexy veterinarian and his crazy practice." It co-stars "a two-foot bundle of mischief named Dr. Zaius," a monkey who was sitting in the audience. Guys with Kids will follow Animal Practice, and was created by Jimmy Fallon. "He's no dummy," said Ms. Salke. "He knew the fastest way to a pickup was to cast four adorable babies." Another show, Go On, will return Friends star Matthew Perry to NBC

The most heavily touted new drama is Revolution, in the plum post-Voice slot on Monday nights (Smash is being saved for the winter). "We went to the man who's synonymous with 'outside the box,'" said Ms. Salke. The show is produced by J.J. Abrams, whose previous show with NBC, Undercovers, was swiftly canceled. After presenting the new comedy and drama series, the execs let the current winner of The Voice sing "I Believe I Can Fly."

"I keep harping on how long it's going to take to rebuild this network," said Mr. Greenblatt. "But we're gonna do it, I promise."

They should just change the shows title to 'Splash'

We were a little put out after watching the pilot for NBC's "hit new show(tm)" Smash and finding out that not once in the entire first episode did Anjelica Huston throw a glass of fluid in someone's face.

The previews for the show had lied to us, because we distinctly remember an entire commercial dedicated to what looked like a super-cut of her character, Broadway producer Eileen Rand, splashing people (usually her ex-husband) like she was on a really classy version of Punk'd. Luckily, the subsequent two episodes have had a lot more pizzazz. Look at that guy's face! Every time! Womp-womp!

Last night on Jimmy Fallon, the host played the clip of Ms. Huston just making everyone so wet, and she responded in kind:

We hope this becomes the Academy Award winner's new calling card: get too close, and she'll just douse you in Chardonnay.

"Smash"

It's so weird that Smash is still on after every entertainment journalist, in the culture dearth of early February, discussed it to death before the premiere (we were hardly immune). Guess what? It wasn't a one-time event! Like Celine Dion's heart, it will go on--at least until the end of the season and then probably much longer! This week, two women sing at each other, and also other people, as the mystery of whether the Broadway-style singer or the pop singer will get a role on Broadway deepens yet further! DVR it--if last week is guide, and why wouldn't it be, everyone will be talking about Smash forever.

Set your DVR for NBC at 10pm.

Madonna strikes a pose. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images)

Yesterday, New York residents found themselves split into two categories: the people who celebrated the New York Giants’ victory over the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl—for the second time!—by reveling in the ticker tape parade that stretched all down Broadway, and the people who spent the day trying to get through their daily commute. We’re not saying that Eli Manning shouldn’t be celebrated like the “elite” quarterback (take that, ESPN) and god of pigskin that he is, but why couldn’t the city have the parade over the weekend?

Not that we’re complaining—O.K., we are complaining—but if there’s anyone whom we should be cheering on for their performance on Sunday night, we’d pick Madonna over Victor Cruz. Not only did she perform more daring feats of agility and endurance than men half her age and eight times her size during her halftime show, but she made us all believers in the power of Madge again. Who cares if she lip-synced through the entire performance (like Elton John snarked that she would)? Madonna—whose reputation in recent years has been overshadowed by the likes of Lady Gaga and her own crazily-muscled arms—made us all believers again in the power of Vogue. We’re convinced that the reason this year’s Super Bowl was the most watched event in history had less to do than those fourth-quarter plays than with nonsports fans tuning in to see the Queen of Pop prove that she still deserves her title (after which those same viewers turned the channel to PBS to catch the new Downton Abbey).

But while Madonna was off representing New York in Indianapolis, the city was having its own musical revolution. Jay-Z performing in Carnegie Hall was history in the making—if only for the fact that he managed to keep Kanye West off the stage for the entire show. We were disappointed to find that Blue Ivy Carter wasn’t wheeled out during Jay’s rendition of “Glory” (especially because the infant provided back-up vocals on the track), as we were entirely prepared to go down on one knee and bow to our new messiah. How can we worship her if People magazine hasn’t even been able to get a cover shot yet? Oh, well. The arrival of Nas on stage was a nice consolation prize.

On the off-chance you weren’t able to snag one of those $1,200 seats for Carnegie’s biggest hip-hop show, you could comfort yourself by curling up on the couch and pretending you were backstage on Broadway. After so much fanfare, Smash finally premiered (though NBC has been promoting the show for so long that we could basically piece the pilot together just from the commercials). The ad campaigns had us confused about the real focus of the show—was it a Glee-like musical about two young women vying to be Marilyn on Broadway, a TV version of Burlesque, or a reality show in which Angelica Houston throws water on people?—but the first episode quickly cleared it up for us. The show was about drama, desperation and adopting Chinese babies. While you can’t judge a show by its pilot (O.K., you can), Smash was objectively not an instant smash hit with the critics. Except for New York Post’s theater critic Michael Riedel, of course, since he’ll be playing himself in the show. Tres meta!

Still, there are far greater tragedies on television than Debra Messing’s wasted screen time: HBO’s dark look at the sleazy world of horse racing turned out to be more of a reality show when PETA discovered that two of the race horses used for the Michael Mann drama had to be put down after fracturing their legs during filming. (They do shoot horses, don’t they?) Our advice to star Dustin Hoffman? Make sure your insurance covers any sort of foot injury. We wouldn’t want to see Tootsie carted off to the glue factory as well.

Even Fashion Week is getting into the musical vibe. We’re especially looking forward to the American Express Tommy Hilfiger show, which will include its own version of Off-Broadway theater with a performance by a fictitious family called (appropriately) the Hilfigers going on a camping adventure. (Did we mention Cobra Starship will be playing a live set during this romp?) The whole scenario couldn’t sound more bizarre if it included a Fashion Week edition of Rich Hil(figer)’s infamous rap classic, “Cookies and Apple Juice.”

Actually, scratch that. We don’t want to make the models hungry, lest they get faint and fall down during their sashay down the runway. They might shoot horses, but the fate of a model that breaks an ankle is way worse: at least the show ponies don’t have to suffer under the withering gaze of the entire Vogue editorial staff in the front row.

Broadway baby Megan Hilty (Getty Images)

In the feature on the death of camp in today's paper, we spoke to Smash star Megan Hilty, who plays one of two actresses auditioning for the role of Marilyn Monroe. "Last year, I was gearing up for yet another pilot season--" Ms. Hilty laughed ruefully "--and the script for Smash just kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. A TV show that was centered around my life and my world and things that I knew so well, and I immediately wanted to be a part of it."

Smash looks at the behind-the-scenes Broadway world, but Ms. Hilty saw a limitation immediately: "The character breakdown was that she was a dancer--in the ensemble for ten years. Knowing people who’ve been in the ensemble—I know I’m not a dancer, I don’t have that skillset. I really, really want to be a part of this, and I don’t want to put myself through a horrifying dance call and waste everybody’s time and my dignity." Happily the show's choreographers were able to set her straight."

As for the show's similarities to that other musical on the air: "People who haven’t seen it, compare it to Glee. How many shows feature music numbers? I think we’re wildly different in tone and subject matter—but we do owe everything we have to Glee."

We asked, in the season that has seen Michelle Williams get nominated for an Oscar for playing Marilyn then trotting that character out on magazine covers, if it was possible to distinguish oneself playing Monroe. "Well, she is certainly having a moment!," said Ms. Hilty. "My whole career so far is taking things other people have established and trying to make them my own!" (Ms. Hilty took over a lead role in Wicked and played the Dolly Parton role in the musical adaptation of 9 to 5.) "I can always hide behind Ivy Lynn. I’m playing a character who’s playing Marilyn Monroe. That makes it a little less daunting. But I’m constantly doing research and—all of her biographies are wildly different and all cover different parts of her life. No one biography has her whole story! There’s always something else to learn and infuse into the character."