This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Mo Brady: Welcome back, listeners, to our tongue-in-cheek recap of what is television's most detailed depiction of the theater industry. And yes, for not much longer, but yes, we are still talking about Smash, the NBC series that chronicled the creation of not one, but two Broadway musicals and all the drama that ensued along the way.

[0:27] Aaron Albano: Oh, we've been going back episode by episode to see how this supposed love letter to Broadway has held up over the past decade. In each podcast episode, we're looking to find the answers to these three questions. Did it represent Broadway then? Does it represent Broadway now? And is it any good?

[0:52] Mo Brady: So let's dive in and talk about Episode 17 of Season 2, the series finale of The Tonys. Aaron, give us those series finale stats.

[1:05] Aaron Albano: Oh my gosh, we made it, Mo. This is wild. Smash's season finale, The Tonys, premiered on May 26, 2013. It was the second part of a two-part series finale event that night. The finale was written by Season 2 showrunner Joshua Safran and directed by Michael Morris, who directed the previous episode as well. Again, two-parter. And surprise, surprise, the viewership stayed the same from the previous episode, which was an hour ago, which came in at a steady 2.44 million viewers.

[1:39] Aaron Albano: Our finale set list was comprised of three songs, one cover and two originals. Our cover featured the majority of our principal cast singing Under Pressure by Queen. For our originals, we were treated to a very Pitch Perfect-esque Tony performance of the Hit List staple, Broadway Here I Come, written by Joe Iconis and performed by the full Hit List cast, sans Mara Davi. And as our finale ultimo, in-house team Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman took the series home with their original song, Big Finish, sung by our leading lady duo, Megan Hilty and Katharine McPhee.

[2:12] Mo Brady: And take us home with our last synopsis, Mo. After two seasons, the companies of Bombshell and Hit List are both Under Pressure as they march toward the Marquis Theatre, home of this year's Tony Awards ceremony. With only 12 hours until the big show, Tom and Julia are writing their possible acceptance speech, Derek is drinking to forget that he publicly admitted casting Daisy in exchange for sex, and Leigh and Ivy discuss how the other one has the better chances of winning. Jimmy is sabotaging himself by attempting to get out of attending the ceremony, until Julia has a come-to-Jesus with him to get the balls to attend. Also, Derek is sabotaging himself by attempting to get out of attending the ceremony, until Ivy has a come-to-Jesus with him to get the balls to attend.

But both end up attending, which is good because they both end up accepting awards: Derek for choreographing Hit List and Jimmy on behalf of Kyle for Hit List's book. Gabe and Lexi are furious that they've been called in to perform at the Tony Awards to support Daisy, until Ivy reminds Karen and company that they can refuse to perform with her. When they do, producer Jerry counters by giving Daisy the chance to perform Reach for Me instead. But following her win for Best Featured Actress, Derek decides to make it right and take Daisy out of the Tony performance, putting in Karen, Jimmy, and surprise, Ana, in an a cappella performance of Broadway Here I Come. After winning for Best Score, newly-minted Tony winners Tom and Julia decide to stay together as a writing team.

Ivy gives a touching ode to live theater in her acceptance speech for Best Actress, and while Hit List walks away with most of the initial awards, Aileen Rand's Bombshell takes home the prize for Best Musical. In its closing moments, the cast of Smash couples up. Ivy with Derek, Julia with Michael Swift, Aileen with her former incarcerated boyfriend, Karen with her prison-bound Jimmy, and the series finale ends with as much of a non-sequitur as it began, an out-of-time duet performance by our two divas giving the show a big finish.

[4:18] Aaron Albano: And a big finish it was.

[4:19] Mo Brady: And a big, weird finish it was. Come on, Karen Cartwright! Where are we going?

[4:31] Aaron Albano: Oh my gosh, it's the finale, Mo!

[4:38] Mo Brady: I honestly can't believe we made it here.

[4:40] Aaron Albano: We totally made it. Like when we started this last fall, I was like, there's no way.

[4:45] Mo Brady: And yet, here we are.

[4:47] Aaron Albano: And here we are. How'd you like this finale?

[4:50] Mo Brady: I'm disappointed in Smash for taking what is the most interesting part of the entire theatrical season, which is award season, and basically ignoring it.

[5:02] Aaron Albano: Sure.

[5:03] Mo Brady: However, I am happy with how the awards went down. I think that it was a good list of winners for the Smash story.

[5:13] Aaron Albano: Sure.

[5:14] Mo Brady: I think it was a good using the Tony ceremony as more of the environment to wrap up these relationships. I thought was done successfully. But you're right. The awards definitely took a backseat to our normal drama within the show, which, while we have spent 32 episodes being upset about that, that's the show we got.

[5:41] Aaron Albano: Yeah, that's the show we got. Like this opening number, it was a little, like you said, glee.

[5:48] Mo Brady: It was very glee.

[5:49] Aaron Albano: The camera circled around them and they're all just standing on an empty stage, staring at each other, singing a pop cover. I guess I can sort of forgive it because it was a dream.

[6:00] Mo Brady: It was Tom's dream.

[6:01] Aaron Albano: It was apparently Tom's dream, which I'm like, why are you dreaming about Ana? You know, suspension of disbelief.

[6:09] Mo Brady: Yeah. What time do you think they filmed all of those Times Square sequences? Because there was not a car on the street.

[6:13] Aaron Albano: Oh, that's real. Probably really early in the morning.

[6:18] Mo Brady: Is that how it usually goes, like an ungodly time to get Times Square shots?

[6:25] Aaron Albano: I've heard that in multiple behind the scenes, like movie featurettes who have to shoot in Times Square. But I think, yeah, I think you're probably called in the evening because it's going to take the crew enough time to get settled, right?

[6:40] Mo Brady: Yeah. Because if you were to film at 5 a.m., then your crew is called at, what, 2 a.m. versus filming at 2 a.m. and your crew is called at 11 p.m.

[6:50] Aaron Albano: Fair.

[6:51] Mo Brady: Tony's Day.

[6:52] Aaron Albano: It is Tony's Day.

[6:53] Mo Brady: It is perhaps the most infamous day in the theater community. And Aaron Albano, as someone who's lived through Tony's Day, what did the show get right versus wrong about the day?

[7:05] Aaron Albano: Where can we begin? I mean, here's my favorite thing about this episode and arguably maybe the industry should take a note out of Smash's book because no one had work this day. Like everyone's just chilling on Tony's Day and I'm like, guess what? This is a Sunday. You at least have a matinee today. Here's how Tony Day actually goes if you have a Sunday matinee, which generally we do. Everyone does. Actors are called to their Broadway theaters at like 5 or 6 in the morning to get ready for a full dress rehearsal of the Tony Awards telecast, which begins at 9 a.m. and ends at noon. So you're working from 6 a.m. until at least noon. Then you have a little bit of break before your matinee, which may be 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. Then when your show ends at 5 or 6, you're getting ready for a Tony Awards ceremony, probably at your theater.

You're getting ready to maybe go to the theater, walk the red carpet perhaps, or just go to your seat because you're also going to have to go backstage at some point and change into your costume for your number. None of this takes place in this Tony Awards. On this day. None of this is happening. We could argue on whether that would be interesting for the viewers or not. Who knows? There's drama in that. It's a real day that is full of drama.

[8:25] Mo Brady: It is an actual day.

[8:27] Aaron Albano: Well, it's an actual work day. I'm like, these people have work today. It is actually the most interesting day. Well, then that entire week prior is a very high-stress week. What you definitely couldn't do is change your number two to three to four times within one day.

[8:47] Mo Brady: Oh, yeah. CBS would not be having that.

[8:52] Aaron Albano: Well, I'm sorry. We have pre-records.

[8:54] Mo Brady: Oh, sure. That's another thing that isn't necessarily widely known is that in the Tony Award performance, the leads are usually singing live. The leads are singing. But because there's not enough microphones in the building or time to get actors in and out of microphones during the telecast, the ensemble is pre-recorded. All of the ensembles will have already done like a pre-record of whatever number they had cleared to do that day.

[9:21] Aaron Albano: This is what I remember telling myself slash ourselves as the Hit List ensemble about how we ended up in this telecast. I justified it in two ways. One was that because it's a cappella, we didn't have to get onto the soundboard. Nobody had to get into mics. I mean, except that even though we're not at Radio City or even at the Beacon, the Marriott Marquis is still a very large theater to fill with your voices. And our stomping and our snapping.

[9:54] Mo Brady: And you're stomping and you're clapping a la Cups style, like who are you, Anna Kendrick? This is very much, yeah, like perfect.

[10:03] Aaron Albano: And then here's the other thing is like, were we in the building? I don't assume so. I think we had decided that these were like our outfits that we wore to a bar to have a viewing party in the neighborhood. And then Derek or maybe Marissa were like, hey, everybody, come to the Marquis. You're going to do Broadway Here I Come.

[10:22] Mo Brady: OK, let's go through the trajectory of Hit List's Tony performance. First it was going to be Voiced in a Dream. And then Jimmy wasn't showing up to anything. And then so then they changed to I'm Not Sorry. Why were we doing I'm Not Sorry?

[10:37] Aaron Albano: Because it's a big number that doesn't include Jeremy.

[10:41] Moe Brady: Even though Daisy's the Tony nominee, so we should have been doing her number anyway.

[10:45] Aaron Albano: Yes. Side note, I have one line in the entire series of Smash, and it is about being furious that I have to perform on the Tony Awards. Furious!

[10:58] Moe Brady: Oh my gosh, Gabe, you've betrayed us! There's no world in which someone doesn't want to perform on the Tony Awards. Absolutely none.

[11:05] Aaron Albano: Oh, of course!

[11:06] Moe Brady: A of all, to take a quote from Aaron Albano, A of all, you get to be on the Tonys. That's the dream, right? That's everyone's dream, is to be on the thing that got them excited about Broadway in the first place. Everybody wants to be on the Tonys.

[11:20] Aaron Albano: Number two, it's a sweet chunk of change. Thank you.

[11:23] Moe Brady: Yes, it is. I'll take a little bit of that cash, no problem. Take that money!

[11:27] Aaron Albano: Why are Gabe and Lexi furious that they got called in?

[11:32] Moe Brady: Oh my gosh, Gabe and Lexi are everything that we hate about Ensembless, and we didn't know until the last episode.

[11:43] Aaron Albano: After I'm Not Sorry, apparently Gabe and Lexi lead a revolt, which apparently you can just stage a coup for the Tony performances.

[11:53] Moe Brady: I mean, in Smash World, it's not the most illogical part of it. So then we switched to Reach for Me, but at that point, okay, so here's where my logic kind of went. When you guys showed up into Broadway Here I Come, I'm like, Jerry is paying you anyway.

[12:10] Aaron Albano: Oh, sure.

[12:11] Moe Brady: So y'all just showed up. The checks are already cut. So you guys are probably just going to stand in the back for Reach for Me anyway. And then instead, y'all chose to do this number.

[12:25] Aaron Albano: Can I admit something, though? I secretly wish in this Tony's themed episode that we got a fake opening number.

[12:33] Moe Brady: Oh my gosh, wouldn't that be great?

[12:35] Aaron Albano: That would have been amazing. If they had just shelled out the dough to have all the other nominees that we just keep hearing about, a la the 2004 One Night Only performance with Hugh Jackman, where he featured all the shows from that season.

[12:52] Moe Brady: That would have been so great.

[12:53] Aaron Albano: It would have been so great. All right, let's go. Let's talk about some award winners.

[12:56] Moe Brady: Okay. Were those the right awards? Did the right people get the right awards?

[13:00] Aaron Albano: I think so.

[13:02] Moe Brady: I mean, who knows if Daisy really want really?

[13:07] Aaron Albano: No, no, no, there is no way that Daisy Parker deserved to win the Best Featured Actress.

[13:14] Moe Brady: No, no, no. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

[13:23] Aaron Albano: Yeah, there's no way Daisy Parker would have won anything.

[13:25] Moe Brady: No, no, man. There's no way.

[13:27] Aaron Albano: There's no way. I think Kyle, for the trajectory of the story, sure. Great. Fine. Kyle wins.

[13:34] Moe Brady: Over Tony Kushner. Didn't Tony Kushner write something?

[13:38] Aaron Albano: Oh, you're right. He wrote Best Book, right?

[13:40] Moe Brady: Yeah, but Kyle won for Best Book.

[13:43] Aaron Albano: Yeah. Giving a Tony Award to Kyle Bishop, whose parents couldn't even be bothered to show up.

[13:50] Moe Brady: Over Tony Kushner. Nah, brah. I'm not here for it.

[13:57] Aaron Albano: See, at this point, I'm like, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, Tom and Julia, I'm fine with because, you know, they and they set it up because the fact that they didn't think they were going to win fooled me into like being happy for them when they did win.

[14:12] Moe Brady: Sucker. Because this was the chemistry that I've been waiting all series for. Because I was like, oh, you're actually friends. I'm finally seeing it in this last moment before the show's over. Like, great.

[14:27] Aaron Albano: All right. Speaking of winners, which was your favorite acceptance speech?

[14:31] Moe Brady: Ivy Linz. Is there even a question?

[14:34] Aaron Albano: I don't know. Jimmy cried.

[14:35] Moe Brady: Jimmy cried and said that weird thing about Kyle where he carries around playbills from flops in his pocket.

[14:40] Aaron Albano: In his pocket. Who has pockets?

[14:47] Moe Brady: In his pocket. I mean, that was pockets large enough for multiple playbills.

[14:55] Aaron Albano: This is my question. That Jimmy acceptance speech. It didn't start out great because at first I was like, if this you've made all this this big old deal about honoring your friend and then your acceptance speech on behalf of him is going to be all about Karen. I'm going to kill you, Jimmy. And then it turned out better. But that whole section where he was talking about Karen, I was like, no, no, no, no, no. You're not honoring anybody by talking about your girlfriend during your dead friends award.

[15:23] Moe Brady: It just really bothered me that his parents weren't there.

[15:26] Aaron Albano: It didn't bother me as much just because I was like, well, you're not a parent.

[15:30] Moe Brady: Fair.

[15:30] Aaron Albano: You're not watching. You're not watching this young man.

[15:33] Moe Brady: It's fair.

[15:35] Aaron Albano: You're like, get there. I would be there.

[15:40] Moe Brady: Sure. No, but Ivy's speech, it was so beautiful. I think we should just hear it in its original form.

[15:49] Aaron Albano: Ladies and gentlemen, Megan Hilty.

[15:53] Megan Hilty: Wow. Okay. I am. I honestly didn't think I would win. Tom, Julia, Eileen, thank you so much for the chance of a lifetime. I'd like to thank my mother, Lee Conroy, the magnificent Lee Conroy. For giving me the greatest gift. And that is a life in the theater. I can only hope that one day I can give that gift to my children. For me, there is nothing more magical than that moment, right as the lights go down. And the crowd is waiting in silence with anticipation for the show to begin. It's a moment full of hope and full of possibilities. So I'd like to thank the audience for coming and for believing, as I do, that there is nothing more important or special as live theater. Thank you so much.

[17:03] Aaron Albano: Side note, we've been watching this Disney junior show called Tots that Brady really likes right now. And Megan has been on a number of Disney junior shows over the years. But she's like a series regular on this show Tots. So I've been going back and forth between watching Megan on Smash and watching Megan on Tots. And it's really funny.

[17:20] Moe Brady: Oh, nice. I'm like the Megan Hilty superfan.

[17:25] Aaron Albano: All right. It's a perfect speech. Break down why this is a perfect speech.

[17:29] Moe Brady: This is the love letter to Broadway that we've been waiting for, for 32 episodes. Like, arguably, we got it from like, Sam Strickland at the end of season one. But like, this is the one where she says, and yes, we know she's pregnant. Yes, that storyline has been inserted here for whatever. But like, we've seen her relationship with her mother as rich as she was this episode, when she says, I'd like to thank my mother Lee Conroy for giving me the best gift and that is a life in theater. I can only hope that one day I can give that gift to my children. It's like, oh, this is the art form that's cross generational. And that you and I know, like for as much as doesn't ring true about Smash sometimes, that love of theater and feeling like the greatest gift is a life in the theater is like, oh, yeah, okay.

Yeah, that's the one and she's like, and then she describes, like, it's the 2013 Tony opening when like, Neil Patrick Harris says, like, we were that kid. Like, that's what this speech is. And it's like, oh, man, I can't like, it takes your breath away. Because this is why we tuned into the show to begin with.

[18:52] Aaron Albano: Right. And especially spoiler alert, when you're watching when Broadway has been shut down for months and may not be coming back for anytime soon, anytime soon. Those specific things she mentions the moment when the lights go down, the crowd is waiting in anticipation for the show to begin. It's full of hope and full of possibilities. I was like, yeah, that's the moment that is that is actually the moment I think everyone is like gunning for right now with theaters closed is yeah, the moment before the curtain comes up is going to feel fucking wild. And when she says like, there is nothing more important or special as live theater. I mean, there is something more important than live theater. Yes, it is democracy and voting rights. However, there is nothing more special than live theater.

[19:42] Moe Brady: Yeah, oh, yes, yes. That English aside, like it is the best sentiment that we could feel as those of us who've made a life in live theater, like and those of us who aspire to a life in live theater, like, this is, this is what this is. This is the love that we know and this is the life that we miss.

[20:16] Aaron Albano: Well, we did it. We did it. Thank you to everyone who's hung in with us during this wonderful journey. I hope you had as much fun as we did, because we certainly had a blast. And if you're not ready for the smash fun to end, join us next week as we recap the entire second season, and honestly, probably the entire series as a whole of Smash. You can find Smash episodes on either the NBC app or on NBC.com. The Ensemblist was produced today by me, Aaron Albano, and me, Moe Brady. There are two great ways you can be helping the Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. And the second is by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist. Please follow the Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts on Spotify, on Apple podcasts, or at vpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. You can also follow us on Instagram. Thanks for listening, everybody. Until next time.