Jennifer Hudson, who guest starred on NBC’s Smash, is now joining the producing team of its upcoming stage musical adaptation.
Hudson, a Grammy, Oscar, Tony, and Emmy winner, announced her participation today on her daytime talk show The Jennifer Hudson Show.
Smash is expected to arrive on Broadway in spring 2025. Executive producers included Steven Spielberg, Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, David Marshall Grant, and Joshua Safran.
Hudson’s participation reunites her with Smash composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and producers Robert Greenblatt and Neil Meron, the team behind NBC’s 2016 Hairspray Live!, the musical special in which she played the role of Motormouth Maybelle.
The Broadway production will be directed by five-time Tony-winning director Susan Stroman, with a score by the Tony- and Grammy- winning duo Shaiman and Wittman, who were most recently on Broadway with Some Like It Hot. Shaiman and Wittman wrote more than two dozen songs for the Smash TV show, many of which will be used in the musical (including the Emmy-nominated “Let Me Be Your Star”). They will also be writing new material.
The musical’s book will be co-written by Rick Elice (currently repped on Broadway with Water For Elephants) and Bob Martin (The Prom, The Drowsy Chaperone). Joshua Bergasse, who choreographed the Smash TV series, will do the same for the stage adaptation.
Like the series created by Theresa Rebeck, the adaptation will chronicle the process of mounting “Bombshell” (the musical within the musical, about the life of Marilyn Monroe), but the stage version is expected depart liberally from the series. The creative team for the musical gathered earlier this year in New York for a series of workshop presentations, following an industry reading in Fall 2023.
Although casting for the Broadway production has not been announced, the cast for the workshop presentations last month included Brooks Ashmanskas, Alex Brightman, Robyn Hurder, Kristine Nielsen, Krysta Rodriguez, Yvette Nicole Brown, Bella Coppola, Nihar Duvvuri, Casey Garvin and Jonalyn Saxer.