Ask her Smash collaborators about Robyn Hurder, they usually use admiring phrases like “chief” (from choreographer Joshua Bergasse) and “Renaissance lady” (from director Susan Stroman) and “old-school triple risk” (each of them).
Ask Robyn Hurder about Robyn Hurder, and also you get remarks like “I used to be essentially the most annoying child”—as a result of she’d announce to every body, “I’m gonna be on Broadway.” Or, speaking about how she used to have the ability to get away with not warming up: “In my 20s I used to be a little bit twit.” And since she’s thrilled that Broadway’s model of Smash lets her be a comic: “I’m such a goober!”
Self-deprecating although she could also be, her laughter, which reveals the 2 dimples on both facet of her mouth, makes it clear that she’s not completely down on herself. In any case, that annoying child had it proper: Hurder has been on Broadway for 20 years. The 20-something twit is now 43, awing Stroman and Bergasse along with her prolonged warm-ups. And, step-by-step, that over-the-top work ethic and centered preparation have landed Hurder the position of her goals within the present of her goals: Ivy Lynn in Smash, on the Imperial Theatre as of March 11.
Smash is the fruits of extra goals than Hurder’s. Greater than 15 years in the past, when Steven Spielberg first proposed a musical tv collection about folks making a fictional Broadway musical, the concept was to take it will definitely to Broadway. Bergasse choreographed the manufacturing numbers for the “Smash” TV present’s fictional musical—a bio of Marilyn Monroe known as Bombshell—and had a longstanding dream of doing Broadway musicals whose “main actor can also be the star dancer.” Stroman, after being “blown away” by Hurder’s Cassie in New York Metropolis Middle’s 2018 manufacturing of A Refrain Line, had been hoping to discover a venture that may carry them collectively.
However Hurder says Smash additionally ticked many bins on her private want listing. “My dream has at all times been to be Marilyn Monroe in some type on Broadway,” she says. As a youngster she’d plastered her bed room with Marilyn images, and injected components of Marilyn into all of the “blonde hussies” she’d performed via the years. Seeing a filmed model of Stroman’s Oklahoma! in 1999, she recollects considering: “This lady is aware of how one can choreograph for girls—I want to bop this!” Taking Bergasse’s class at Broadway Dance Middle in 2002, she “fell in love together with his motion.” Obsessively watching the musical numbers from “Smash,” she longed to sing the Marc Shaiman–Scott Wittman songs and dance the Bergasse choreography, and he or she watched Megan Hilty, because the Broadway professional Ivy Lynn, do Ivy’s huge numbers “over and again and again.” When she auditioned for the position and noticed Bergasse, Stroman, Shaiman, and Wittman sitting behind the desk, she realized, “That is my bucket listing abruptly.”
After all, the audition butterflies went wild. However we’re getting forward of ourselves. Her highway to that room started exterior of Portland, Maine, in Windham. She grew up with two older brothers and oldsters with whom she went to native musicals, watched motion pictures, and listened to a variety of music however who had no skilled connection to the humanities. (Her father bought flooring.) She was enrolled in Gail Grant’s dance studio in a church in Scarborough, Maine, when she was 7 as a result of she was at all times dancing round and her mom needed somebody to “arrange” her motion.
Hurder’s backstory has the weather of the usual Broadway dancer’s story, however like her dancing, it has a singular stamp. She took to her faucet and ballet courses, however at 8, she was able to stop. “I needed to play with my associates,” she says. Her mom insisted she end out the 12 months, and lightning struck midway via, when the varsity added jazz dance to the curriculum. “I used to be bought,” she says. Proper from the beginning, she was “switching the choreography to make it sassier,” she recollects with amusing. “I needed to maneuver my hips extra. It actually sparked one thing in me.”
The spark become a roaring hearth when her mom took her to see CATS. The dimples seem as she laughs at herself but once more: “I’m that lady—who noticed CATS and mentioned, ‘I’m gonna do this for a dwelling.’ ” Her destiny was sealed on the finish of the 12 months, when she heard the cheering after her quantity on the faculty recital. After her first dose of that “drug,” she says, “There was by no means a second in my life once I needed to do the rest.”
By 11, she’d realized that she would wish extra severe ballet coaching, and he or she switched to the Maine State Ballet. “I knew it might make me the dancer I needed to be,” she says. She stayed for seven years, turning into a soloist and serving to to show courses. She left after a short run as Mary Magdalene in a neighborhood manufacturing of Jesus Christ Famous person, and did some summer time inventory earlier than finally coming to New York Metropolis.
She booked ensemble jobs on Broadway and on tour, very intentionally working her manner up the ranks. “I needed the climb,” she says. “I’m a learner by doing—I actually wish to expertise each a part of this enterprise.” The ensemble led her to protecting, after which to featured roles. She created the position of Jeannie Muldoon in Good Work If You Can Get It on Broadway; she coated for Roxie Hart in Chicago, and performed Cassie in a touring manufacturing of A Refrain Line. (Fellow dancer/singer/actor Clyde Alves was additionally on that Refrain Line tour, as Mike, they usually had been married in the course of the run. When their son, Hudson, was 2, they left their Washington Heights condominium in Manhattan for a rural spot about an hour north, “so he might have what I had as a child,” Hurder says.) She earned a supporting actress Tony nomination for her scorching portrayal of Nini in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and a Chita Rivera Award for the ferocious dancing she did as Neil Diamond’s second spouse, Marcia Murphey, in A Stunning Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical. And final 12 months, she returned to Chicago as Velma Kelly.
These lead performances, she admits, had been grueling, and he or she believes Ivy is 1,000 occasions more durable. “She is the musical Bombshell, and whenever you see her, she is full-tilt. It’s 150 %.” Making ready to provide 150 %, she says, is “like coaching for the Olympics. It takes a number of power, a number of focus.” Mates inform her to “put it aside” for the present. “However no! I’m so hardcore—I have to do that, construct the stamina for eight exhibits,” she says. “I wish to be constant, I wish to give each viewers an opening-night efficiency.” Her fame as an achieved prepare dinner stems from the identical impulse. (She says if she couldn’t carry out for folks, she’d be feeding them.)
Because the Smash premiere approaches, she’s feeling each anxious and prepared. She says that Nini and Marcia and Velma and Cassie have all been essential forerunners for Ivy. “I wanted these steps to reach right here,” she says. “After this present, I’ll be, ‘Properly, I did it.’ I starred in a Broadway present. This has been my purpose, and I labored my ass off to get there.”
Which brings us to that audition for Smash, and the roadup behind the desk. When she realized {that a} stage model of “Smash” was certainly heading for Broadway, she known as her agent and mentioned, “I should be seen for Ivy.” She in all probability might have skipped the cellphone name, as a result of Stroman was already urging her on the group. “I instructed them, ‘If we actually need this lady to be a triple risk, it’s obtained to be somebody like Robyn Hurder,’ ” Stroman says. “‘And I feel it ought to be Robyn Hurder.’ ” Regardless of her nerves, Hurder says, she might inform that they had been pulling for her. “There was a lot love,” she says. “I might really feel that they needed me to get it.”
Bergasse confirms her hunch. “I was sweating,” he recollects. “ ‘Please, please, please do properly—I actually need you to bop this position.’ And she or he killed it.”
“Smash,” From TV to Broadway
Susan Stroman’s agent was on the cellphone with a bizarre query: Would she ever direct one thing and never choreograph it?
In all probability not, she replied, until “it was some extraordinary state of affairs.”
It was. The producers bringing “Smash” to Broadway needed her to direct it, however additionally they needed to retain Joshua Bergasse, who had so memorably choreographed the TV collection.
That made sense, Stroman says: “Josh’s work was fantastic on the TV present, and it might be horrible if he wasn’t capable of choreograph it.” So she determined to satisfy him and ask how he would really feel about having her direct. “We had an exquisite lunch, and we fell in love with one another, and I knew it might work out,” she says.
On his finish, Bergasse had been watching and ready as Smash’s creators and producers—skilled theater folks—struggled to delivery a stage musical from the collection’ 32 episodes. “The TV present was its personal beast,” he says, “and attempting to translate it was difficult.” It was writers Rick Elice and Bob Martin who cracked it, doing what Bergasse calls “a 180” and turning TV’s backstage drama into Broadway’s backstage comedy, leaving intact the musical throughout the musical.
When he heard a producer speculating about getting Stroman to direct the brand new script, Bergasse recollects considering, “ ‘Oh, gosh, there goes my job.’ However then another person mentioned, ‘Would she do it with one other choreographer?’ ”
He was glad the reply was sure, “as a result of I simply look as much as her a lot,” he says. “I really like all of her work, and I’ve by no means gotten to work along with her.”
He’s additionally glad to be getting one other shot at Bombshell, he says. Though its beloved dance numbers stay, they wanted tweaking as a way to learn correctly on the stage. “I really like choreographing to this music,” Bergasse says. “And perhaps I’m 12 years wiser?”