Catch up on Smash every night with Playbill! It's available to stream with commercials on NBC, and available for purchase on Amazon. Episode 8 recap here.

What do you do after your workshop fizzles? Well, Tom got a haircut, Ivy Lynn has an audition, and Julia skips breakfast with Brian D'Arcy James. Pretty typical—like Ivy Lynn, after playing Marilyn for one workshop, turning to pills to maintain. Leslie Odom Jr. isn't having it. Also pretty typical, Karen gets an audition for an orange juice commercial, and lands it. Pretty much in front of her competition, Ivy Lynn. Poor gal. Good thing she's got that Ambien.

Anna Paquin, Anna Faris, Kate Winslet—who would you want to lend her star power to a musical about Marilyn Monroe? What about... REBECCA DUVALL? (You know she'll be a contender because she's not real!) Actually, Derek doesn't care about any of those names, because as he points out, there isn't a script. Nor a title. And what are they going to show Anna Paquin?!

We get another glimpse of Heaven on Earth, which is like the the Washington, D.C., version of Beetlejuice in the Netherworld, just G-rated. And Norbert Leo Butz stars! According to Amazon Prime X-ray, he's playing... himself. Add it to the list of real people in fake shows!

And add Brian D'Arcy James to the list of drama queens. He lays an elaborate trap for Julia, playing a song she wrote about Michael Swift as she walks into the apartment. He knows... he just knows! (His delivery reminds me of Diana Scarwid in What Lies Beneath, telling Michelle Pfeiffer about catching her husband with another woman, which is an extremely deep cut). He calls her disgusting, Julia cries, he storms out and goes straight to New York Theatre Workshop, where he confronts Michael Swift as he's leaving. That's weird, because Michael Swift was doing that Bruno Mars thing at La MaMa, not New York Theatre Workshop.

While people are living their drab lives, Karen is figuring out life as an Actor! She's doing a mostly CGI commercial and Ivy Lynn is. furious. about. it. After calling out Karen's "Midwestern moonface," she storms out of Joe Allen's and goes back to her apartment where Derek is reading pilot scripts. Ivy Lynn, if you're going to tolerate this insane man, at least get to stay in his fabulous apartment where you can wrap yourself in an expensive sheet and spy on your man from his staircase.

Instead she pops a pill before a performance and staggers out onstage in her angel costume, giggling like a maniac and battling with her wings, her heels, and her harmonies. And into this disaster Miss Golden Sprout herself walks in backstage to return Ivy Lynn's sunglasses. She sees Ivy Lynn fall and get screamed at to "get off the freakin' stage" by Norbert Leo Butz.

On the street outside the theatre (still in costume, Equity will be pissed), Ivy Lynn continues of her Truth-Telling Tour and lets Karen have it. Karen serves it right back, telling her that Derek had come on to her first and she turned him down. "Whatever," Ivy Lynn says. "My mother said worse than that over Sunday dinner. And school nights." Then they get a bottle in a brown paper bag and drink in the middle of Times Square. Sorry. Drink and sing in the middle of Times Square (with a giant billboard for the Bernadette Peters production of Gypsy that closed in 2004). Apparently booze vastly improves Ivy Lynn's coordination because during this musical number, she doesn't fall down once! As it happens, Playbill was on the scene for the filming of that scene—watch in the video above!

We get another tearful goodbye between Michael Swift and Julia (too bad we get less time of her being a writer instead of a wife, mother, mistress), during which she lands on the title for the musical. BOMBSHELL. Like what her affair did to her marriage! Kaboom.

ELLIS NONSENSE
Acting like he's a real producer on the musical and patronizing Derek; going behind Eileen's back and taking a meeting with Rebecca Duvall's manager; sleeping with the manager to seal the deal; telling Eileen he doesn't want to answer her phones anymore, he wants to co-produce (Eileen at least shuts that tf down).

THE SONGS
"The Higher You Get, the Farther You Fall," "Cheers (Drink to That)"

THE STARS
Norbert Leo Butz; Doug Hughes; Michael Riedel

THE SCARVES
4 (Karen, Derek, Tom, random extra)