Fade in on Broadway’s Krysta Rodriguez, SMASH’s Sole Screen-to-Stage Star

In the winter of 2012, the curtain rose on SMASH, a new musical series that brought the drama of Broadway to the small screen.

Produced by Stephen Spielberg, the NBC show starred Debra Messing, Christian Borle, Jack Davenport, Megan Hilty, Katharine McPhee and Anjelica Huston as the cast and creative team behind the making of Bombshell, a fictional Broadway biopic about the life of Marilyn Monroe.

Over 32 episodes, SMASH developed a devoted cult following as Hilty’s perpetual chorus girl Ivy Lynn and McPhee’s wide-eyed Iowa transplant Karen Cartwright competed for the role of a lifetime and Bombshell wound its way, dramatically, to the Great White Way — complete with original songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (the Tony-winning duo behind Hairspray) and appearances from real-life Broadway legends like Bernadette Peters and Liza Minnelli.

In Season 2, SMASH introduced Hit List, an edgy, RENT-inspired rival to the Marilyn-centric passion project at the center of its plot, and added even more theater industry names to its cast, including Jeremy Jordan, Andy Mientus and Krysta Rodriguez.

Already well-known to theater kids across the country thanks to Broadway credits like Spring Awakening, In The Heights and The Addams Family, Rodriguez memorably played Ana Vargas, Karen’s best friend and roommate who eventually landed the role Hit List’s resident popstar villain The Diva.

After SMASH was abruptly cancelled in 2013, Rodriguez continued to make a name for herself on stage and screen alike, whether she was playing Cinderella in the acclaimed 2023 Broadway revival of Into the Woods, appearing in TV shows like Younger, Trial & Error and Quantico, or even stepping into the iconic shoes of Liza Minnelli in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix limited series Halston.

Now, 12 years after taking her final bow as Ana Vargas, Rodriguez is back in SMASH — this time on Broadway. Directed by five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman, Smash (the musical) is officially set to open on April 10 at the Imperial Theatre, and also stars Robyn Hurder, Brooks Ashmanskas, John Behlmann, and Caroline Bowman.

Remarkably, the Broadway veteran carries the distinction of being the lone cast member to star in both the original TV show and its long-awaited stage adaptation, which fans have been clamoring for in one way or another since virtually the moment SMASH went off the air.

Don’t expect a shot-for-shot recreation of the original series, though. Billed as “the ultimate love letter to Broadway,” Smash uses the show’s well-loved framework as inspiration to tell an entirely new story filled with new characters, new laughs and plenty of new bombshells.

Ahead of opening night, Rodriguez sat down with Ticketmaster to dish about bringing SMASH to Broadway, the differences between the show and the musical, her favorite memories from filming the original series and more.

It’s been a dozen years since SMASH was on TV, and now it’s finally coming to Broadway. Did you ever expect the show to live this many lives?

No, absolutely not. Flat-out no. [Laughs] You never know what will resonate, but the second season of the show was airing when I was doing a Broadway show [2013’s First Date]. So when I’d come out to the stage door, I would hear people say, “Oh, we’re so disappointed that SMASH got cancelled! We love SMASH!” Then just every day since then, there has been someone saying that. And so here we are!

You’re the only person to star in both the original TV series and the new Broadway musical. What does that mean to you?

It’s exciting! Everybody’s asking, like, “How does it feel? It must be so crazy!” And it doesn’t feel strange at all. It’s a completely different medium, a different story, I’m a different character. So it’s been fun to dive into all that. You know, I was very much in the Hit List camp [on the original series], so to be in the Bombshell family is a totally different experience.

As you mentioned, the musical is a totally new SMASH. From what I understand, almost every character is a new character, and even Ivy and Karen are not the Ivy and Karen of the TV show. What should fans expect going into the musical?

Well, I’ve been describing it as SMASH fanfiction. It’s the same kind of world with the same sort of people, but it’s the multiverse of SMASH. But it’s songs you love, it’s dancing you’ve seen, it’s characters you’ve come to be familiar with — in different dynamics with different outcomes. And because it’s being told by real, like, theater people, they started to lean into the comedy of how dramatic making a musical can be, sometimes.

Tell me a little about your character, Tracy.

Tracy is the lyricist and, kind of, co-composer [of Bombshell] with Jerry, her husband. So it’s a bit of a different dynamic from the TV show where, instead of best friends, we are a married couple. So that adds another layer of how you have to go home after work together — it ups the stakes for us. I’m writing Bombshell as a celebration of Marilyn Monroe, but I’m sort of championing for some more depth and more context of Marilyn, and in this day and age, what we want to hear from her. And then how that sort of gets away from us all…

So obviously, Tracy is not Debra Messing’s Julia Houston, but I have to ask for the OG fans: do scarves play any sort of role in your character’s wardrobe?

Many appearances. Many appearances. We made sure. They’re firmly involved in the character, yes.

Many of the most famous musical numbers from the show are similar, like “Let Me Be Your Star” and “Don’t Forget Me.” How do they function in telling this new story on stage?

Well, what’s interesting is that, because we are the writers, there’s sort of a play, and there’s a musical. And so the music functions in the musical: You see it in rehearsal, you see it on stage in context of the show, you see it as passage of time. But you rarely see it as a vehicle for the emotions of the characters.

There’s nine of us who are writing the show, and then there’s the people who are performing the musical. So that’s a really unique thing — you don’t usually get to see those sort of two trains running alongside each other. So the music really functions in a fun way, to see [the] nuts and bolts [of how] you create a show. Like, the opening number that we released to show Robyn singing is kind of very purposefully a little too fast, and it has too many words and it’s a little too over-staged and overwritten because eventually, you watch us concoct what becomes the “Let Me Be Your Star” that we all know and love throughout the first act of the show. It’s sort of used as a mechanism to tell the story of making a show more than it is the emotional journey of each character.

As Tracy, do you have any musical numbers of your own?

I have one song, where I am teaching Ivy a song that I wrote. So I get to play it and sing it for her, and then she joins in. All of us have a little bit of singing, but only what makes very logical sense for the writers to be singing.

And please tell me that they’ve kept “20th Century Fox Mambo.”

Is that your top? The one that you needed?

Well, you know, “Change the clothes, fix the nose, and then 5, 6, 7, 8, action!”

[Laughs] They have, yes. It’s different in our show, but yes.

Similarly to the show, the musical takes audiences on a journey through the making of Bombshell. What are some of the universal truths that the musical shares about bringing a show to Broadway?

That it’s really difficult. That it’s a miracle that it ever works, and it’s so hard to bring so many people together with all different specialties. What our show is about is, when you start to make a musical and then it starts to kind of fall off the rails a little bit, do little moves get you back? Do big moves get you back? There are so many dynamics around that. So yeah, we share that DNA with the TV series as well.

And then we share that DNA with really putting up a musical [in real life], too. You know, we had someone out on our first preview and we had to shuffle things around, and we’ve had to cancel shows because of certain things. Then there’s the audience’s feedback and the social media of it all. They don’t like something! Social media hates it! All of those things we’ve added into the show, so it’s very realistic while being amped up and quite funny.

I take it that’s something you’ve experienced time and time again throughout your career with all the different shows that you’ve done on Broadway.

Yeah — how you develop over years, you know? It’s like, one reading goes really well, they make a few tweaks, and all of a sudden one little tweak could send you down the wrong river. Or maybe it’s the right river! And you would’ve never made it there without this new character you wrote or this actor that you hired or this set piece that makes it so beautiful. I mean, you can have The Outsiders, but unless you have that rain and that lighting and that rumble, you don’t have The Outsiders, you know? So there are so many elements that you don’t even know if they work until you’re on the stage, on Broadway, hoping that people respond to it.

Going back to the TV show, do you have a favorite memory of filming as Ana?

I have a lot of great memories — I mean, I met my best friends on that show. Andy Mientus and I still live together, we’re very close. And Jeremy [Jordan], if he didn’t have a wife and a kid, he’d probably be living with us too. We love him. Wes Taylor and I had been friends, and then done Addams Family for a long time. I knew so many people in the show. We were all these, like, little rascal-y theater kids all of a sudden on TV.

My favorite memory is actually not from filming. It was lunchtime and it was nice outside, so we all brought our lunch out, and we were sitting outside in the sun. I just remember — there’s a picture of us, we’re just, like, laughing and we look so happy — the optimism of this next phase of our life. It just really was a huge moment of all of us doing something scary and new that we had never done, that’s sort of in the vein of the things we had done, which is theater. It was a really joyous and innocent and euphoric time in my life.

Do you have a favorite song that you performed as Ana?

It’s a tie. I would say the silk number, “Reach for Me,” but I don’t know that I would say it’s my favorite because it was so scary. It’s my favorite to look back on and think about, but man, it was really scary. The week before, they were like, “Are you afraid of heights?” and I was like, “I don’t think so…” Cut to a week later, I’m, like, upside down and 30 feet in the air with no net or rigging. I’m just wrapped in that silk, it’s just real. So I’m proud of that. And, you know, “If I Were a Boy,” which is, like, my bar number. That was the first time I really got to sing on the show.

It’s kind of wild to think about how many other SMASH alums are also headlining shows on Broadway this season. Jeremy Jordan’s doing the revival of Floyd Collins, Megan Hilty’s killing it in Death Becomes Her, and Bernadette Peters is bringing Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends from the West End.

Yeah! And Christian [Borle] had Tammy Faye this season.

What does it feel like to see so many of you all lighting up Broadway at the same time?

It’s not a surprise to me. We were Broadway babies before, we’ll be Broadway babies forever. Part of what made us want to make the TV show really good was that we knew we’d be coming back [to Broadway]; we wanted to do our community proud. And so hopefully, we’re doing that with this musical.

Speaking of “Reach For Me,” I didn’t realize until I rewatched it recently that Cole Escola makes an appearance as the coat check attendant while you’re performing the song. Apparently, that was one of their first big TV credits.

I didn’t realize it either! I remembered live-tweeting that episode and when they came out, everyone was like, “Oh my god, it’s Cole Escola! Oh my god, it’s Cole Escola!” [I was like], “Who is that person?” That was my first introduction to Cole, and now look at them, they’re just a huge star.

All these years later, what do you feel is the legacy of SMASH?

Wow, the legacy of the show… I do think that it introduced Broadway to a large amount of people. In the same way Glee really brought out that it was okay to be a theater nerd in school, I felt like SMASH was sort of the adult of that. Like, this is what it’s like to really commit your life to this. It’s the “What I Did For Love” of TV shows.

How does the Broadway production add to that legacy?

I think in the same way that on Grey’s Anatomy, they don’t do surgeries in the dark, there were some things that weren’t, like, historically accurate about SMASH, because you have to kind of manufacture that drama. So that was a thing that people took away, and I think we actually address that in [the musical] a little bit. I mean, listen, it’s a farce. There’s some really under the sink things in there. But they’re the things that maybe we would find funny instead of the things we’re trying to pass off as realistic.

SMASH has always been a love letter to Broadway. What does the musical say about the art form of theater?

That you just keep trying no matter what happens. That we do this because we love it. I don’t want to spoil anything, but one of the main takeaways is that even the greats say, “When you finish one, you start work on the next one the next day.” It’s that no matter what happens, it’s not about the reviews, it’s not about the hits and the Tonys. It’s that this is our life, and we can’t imagine doing anything else.