Ask her Smash collaborators about Robyn Hurder, and they use admiring words like “leader” (from choreographer Joshua Bergasse) and “Renaissance woman” (from director Susan Stroman) and “old-school triple threat” (both of them).
Ask Robyn Hurder about Robyn Hurder, and you get remarks like “I was the most annoying kid”—because she’d announce to one and all, “I’m gonna be on Broadway.” Or, talking about how she used to be able to get away with not warming up: “In my 20s I was a little twit.” And because she’s thrilled that Broadway’s version of Smash lets her be a comedian: “I’m such a goober!”
Robyn Hurder rehearsing Smash. Photo courtesy Polk & Co.
Self-deprecating though she may be, her laughter, which reveals the two dimples on either side of her mouth, makes it clear that she’s not totally down on herself. After all, that annoying kid had it right: Hurder has been on Broadway for 20 years. The 20-something twit is now 43, awing Stroman and Bergasse with her extended warm-ups. And, step by step, that over-the-top work ethic and focused preparation have landed Hurder the role of her dreams in the show of her dreams: Ivy Lynn in Smash, at the Imperial Theatre as of March 11.
Smash is the culmination of more dreams than Hurder’s. More than 15 years ago, when Steven Spielberg first proposed a musical television series about people making a fictional Broadway musical, the idea was to take it eventually to Broadway. Bergasse choreographed the production numbers for the “Smash” TV show’s fictional musical—a bio of Marilyn Monroe called Bombshell—and had a longstanding dream of doing Broadway musicals whose “leading actor is also the star dancer.” Stroman, after being “blown away” by Hurder’s Cassie in New York City Center’s 2018 production of A Chorus Line, had been hoping to find a project that would bring them together.
But Hurder says Smash also ticked many boxes on her personal wish list. “My dream has always been to be Marilyn Monroe in some form on Broadway,” she says. As a teenager she’d plastered her bedroom with Marilyn photos, and injected elements of Marilyn into all the “blonde hussies” she’d played through the years. Seeing a filmed version of Stroman’s Oklahoma! in 1999, she recalls thinking: “This woman knows how to choreograph for women—I need to dance this!” Taking Bergasse’s class at Broadway Dance Center in 2002, she “fell in love with his movement.” Obsessively watching the musical numbers from “Smash,” she longed to sing the Marc Shaiman–Scott Wittman songs and dance the Bergasse choreography, and she watched Megan Hilty, as the Broadway pro Ivy Lynn, do Ivy’s big numbers “over and over and over again.” When she auditioned for the role and saw Bergasse, Stroman, Shaiman, and Wittman sitting behind the table, she realized, “This is my bucket list all at once.”
Robyn harder than Cassie in a chorus line. Photo Courtesy harder.
Of course, the audition butterflies went wild. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Her road to that room began outside of Portland, Maine, in Windham. She grew up with two older brothers and parents with whom she went to local musicals, watched movies, and listened to a wide range of music but who had no professional connection to the arts. (Her father sold flooring.) She was enrolled in Gail Grant’s dance studio in a church in Scarborough, Maine, when she was 7 because she was always dancing around and her mother wanted someone to “organize” her movement.
Hurder’s backstory has the elements of the standard Broadway dancer’s tale, but like her dancing, it has a unique stamp. She took to her tap and ballet classes, but at 8, she was ready to quit. “I wanted to play with my friends,” she says. Her mother insisted she finish out the year, and lightning struck halfway through, when the school added jazz dance to the curriculum. “I was sold,” she says. Right from the start, she was “switching the choreography to make it sassier,” she recalls with a laugh. “I wanted to move my hips more. It really sparked something in me.”
Robyn Hurder as Nini in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. She says the character was a crucial forerunner for Smash’s Ivy Lynn. Photo by Matthew Murphy, courtesy Boneau/Bryan-Brown.
The spark turned into a roaring fire when her mother took her to see CATS. The dimples appear as she laughs at herself yet again: “I’m that girl—who saw CATS and said, ‘I’m gonna do that for a living.’ ” Her fate was sealed at the end of the year, when she heard the cheering after her number at the school recital. After her first dose of that “drug,” she says, “There was never a moment in my life when I wanted to do anything else.”
By 11, she’d realized that she would need more serious ballet training, and she switched to the Maine State Ballet. “I knew it would make me the dancer I wanted to be,” she says. She stayed for seven years, becoming a soloist and helping to teach classes. She left after a brief run as Mary Magdalene in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and did some summer stock before ultimately coming to New York City.
Robyn Hurder as Jeannie Muldoon in Nice Work If You Can Get It (here with Chris Sullivan). Photo courtesy Hurder.
She booked ensemble jobs on Broadway and on tour, very deliberately working her way up the ranks. “I wanted the climb,” she says. “I’m a learner by doing—I really want to experience every part of this business.” The ensemble led her to covering, and then to featured roles. She created the role of Jeannie Muldoon in Nice Work If You Can Get It on Broadway; she covered for Roxie Hart in Chicago, and played Cassie in a touring production of A Chorus Line. (Fellow dancer/singer/actor Clyde Alves was also on that Chorus Line tour, as Mike, and they were married during the run. When their son, Hudson, was 2, they left their Washington Heights apartment in Manhattan for a rural spot about an hour north, “so he could have what I had as a kid,” Hurder says.) She earned a supporting actress Tony nomination for her sizzling portrayal of Nini in Moulin Rouge! The Musical and a Chita Rivera Award for the ferocious dancing she did as Neil Diamond’s second wife, Marcia Murphey, in A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical. And last year, she returned to Chicago as Velma Kelly.
Robyn Hurder as Marcia Murphey in A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical. Photo by Julieta Cervantes, courtesy DKC/O&M Co.
Those lead performances, she admits, were grueling, and she believes Ivy is 1,000 times harder. “She is the musical Bombshell, and when you see her, she is full-tilt. It’s 150 percent.” Preparing to give 150 percent, she says, is “like training for the Olympics. It takes a lot of strength, a lot of focus.” Friends tell her to “save it” for the show. “But no! I am so hardcore—I have to do this, build the stamina for eight shows,” she says. “I want to be consistent, I want to give every audience an opening-night performance.” Her reputation as an accomplished cook stems from the same impulse. (She says if she couldn’t perform for people, she’d be feeding them.)
As the Smash premiere approaches, she’s feeling both anxious and ready. She says that Nini and Marcia and Velma and Cassie have all been crucial forerunners for Ivy. “I needed those steps to arrive here,” she says. “After this show, I’ll be, ‘Well, I did it.’ I starred in a Broadway show. This has been my goal, and I worked my ass off to get there.”
Robyn Hurder as Nini in Moulin Rouge! The Musical (here with Ricky Rojas). Photo by Matthew Murphy, courtesy Boneau/Bryan-Brown.
Which brings us to that audition for Smash, and the lineup behind the table. When she learned that a stage version of “Smash” was indeed heading for Broadway, she called her agent and said, “I need to be seen for Ivy.” She probably could have skipped the phone call, because Stroman was already urging her on the team. “I told them, ‘If we really want this girl to be a triple threat, it’s got to be someone like Robyn Hurder,’ ” Stroman says. “‘And I think it should be Robyn Hurder.’ ” Despite her nerves, Hurder says, she could tell that they were pulling for her. “There was so much love,” she says. “I could feel that they wanted me to get it.”
Bergasse confirms her hunch. “I was sweating,” he recalls. “ ‘Please, please, please do well—I really want you to dance this role.’ And she killed it.”
“Smash,” From TV to Broadway
Susan Stroman’s agent was on the phone with a weird question: Would she ever direct something and not choreograph it?
Probably not, she replied, unless “it was some extraordinary situation.”
It was. The producers bringing “Smash” to Broadway wanted her to direct it, but they also wanted to retain Joshua Bergasse, who had so memorably choreographed the TV series.
That made sense, Stroman says: “Josh’s work was wonderful on the TV show, and it would be terrible if he wasn’t able to choreograph it.” So she decided to meet him and ask how he would feel about having her direct. “We had a wonderful lunch, and we fell in love with each other, and I knew it would work out,” she says.
A Smash rehearsal. Photo courtesy Polk & Co.
On his end, Bergasse had been watching and waiting as Smash’s creators and producers—experienced theater folk—struggled to birth a stage musical from the series’ 32 episodes. “The TV show was its own beast,” he says, “and trying to translate it was challenging.” 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 within the musical.
When he heard a producer speculating about getting Stroman to direct the new script, Bergasse recalls thinking, “ ‘Oh, gosh, there goes my job.’ But then someone else said, ‘Would she do it with another choreographer?’ ”
He was glad the answer was yes, “because I just look up to her so much,” he says. “I love all of her work, and I’ve never gotten to work with her.”
He’s also happy to be getting another shot at Bombshell, he says. Although its beloved dance numbers remain, they needed tweaking in order to read properly on the stage. “I love choreographing to this music,” Bergasse says. “And maybe I’m 12 years wiser?”
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