dvd of the week
The second season of that other musical on TV starts Feb. 6, which should give you enough time to catch up by watching the first 15 episodes. Like Glee, Smash is amazingly uneven, occasionally sublime, but mostly fascinatingly bad.
The story of the making of a Broadway musical about the life of Marilyn Monroe, it stars wooden but gorgeous American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee as a chorus girl thrust into stardom; Megan Hilty as her much more experienced competition; Debra Messing and Christian Borle as the show’s creators and Angelica Huston as its producer.
The songs, mostly written by March Shaiman and Scott Whitman, are cute but mostly forgetful. But sometimes the musical numbers are sublime, as great as some of the soapy dramatic sequences are absurd and silly. It’s the best show to hate to watch this spring.
