Still obsessed. So far, so good.
Last time, we met the major characters and saw them start writing Marilyn: The Musical, and casting the workshops. They’re moving FAST – Grace and Tom write songs very quickly, and they have a producer (Angelica, I guess we can start calling her Eileen now) and a director/choreographer (Slutty Derek) on board.
This week opened up 4 days after the end of last week’s episode. Karen (McPhee) and Ivy (Hilty) are both losing their minds wondering if they got the role after their singing callback.
Turns out, the MM team hasn’t yet made up their minds. They love that Ivy LOOKS like Marilyn, oozes sex, and is sort of world-weary and cynical while remaining hopeful. We know that these are characteristics of Marilyn because characters keep pausing to share little factoids. In the meantime, they love that Karen is a small-town girl from the Midwest with big eyes, big dreams, and a new-girl-in-town air about her. This ALSO is a characteristic of Marilyn. The real difference is that Karen is Early MM and Ivy is Later MM. MM Team decides to have MOAR callbacks.
For the callback to the callback, Karen has to learn how to dance. Ivy can dance, and picks moves up quickly (as she must, having spent many years in the chorus). They want both girls to run lines and try doing some acting. One of Ivy’s BFFs is a dancer and he is in the callback workshops with Karen, somewhat spying on her dance skills. Not maliciously, just trying to help out his friend. Karen, meanwhile, is exhausted but she loves it and she sure tries hard. After spending a lot of hours, she pulls off a pretty great song-and-dance number (20th Century Foxtrot/Mambo?). She’s becoming a better actress as well.
Problem being, Karen is a much slower learner than Ivy. Ivy is a veteran of the business, and takes much less time to be rehearsal-ready. With the accelerated timeline of this show, that could make all the difference. Ivy’s other big failing is that she’s a perfectionist. She’s over-prepared. She’s already living and breathing MM, perfecting the way to move her mouth and speak and walk — and she doesn’t even have the part yet. Yipes.
Tom is (rightly) pointing out to Grace (sorry Debra Messing, as long as you’re playing a gal with a gay BFF your name is Grace) that they can’t just keep writing song after song after song without doing any work on the book. The book (script, if you must) is lagging way behind all the songs, and the order of the songs isn’t nailed down enough to start to form a book around them.
Eileen’s ex-husband and ex-producing partner questions her plans for Marilyn, and points out (foreshadowing?) that they were a good team because he had a business mind while she had vision. She needs somebody to slow her down and make financial sense of things. In response, Eileen throws a drink in his face and speeds up the plan for Marilyn: workshop, out-of-town open, B’way. Fast, but not unheard of.
Pointless Side Stories: Karen’s perfect boyfriend Dev is perhaps not-so-perfect because he got mad at her once; Grace and her husband apparently decided to adopt from China while missing the memo that it takes a good 3 years to do so; Grace’s kid is a lousy actor who was given HORRIBLE lines about desperately wanting his little sister to come home from China; Shady Ellis is still totally shady has taken to listening at every door he can find; Ivy slept with Slutty Derek but he doesn’t seem to be playing favorites.
The episode ended with Ivy being cast as Marilyn for purposes of the workshop. Karen is sad. But considering she’s been in the middle of ALL the promo materials for the show, I can’t imagine she’s gone for good. Not yet.
No preview for next week, so we’re all in for a big surprise.
