Tom Levitt

Tom Levitt (played by Christian Borle) has been one of the most colorful presences on Broadway in the last decade. One half of the popular Houston-Levitt team, Levitt lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Tom is first seen in Pilot after returning to New York after he and Julia return after the West End opening of Heaven on Earth. He is very proud that he has a new assistant, and he and Julia have a mock fight over whether Ellis is gay. After catching him reading a Marilyn Monroe autobiography, they begin to talk about how she would make a great musical. he visits his friends at Heaven on Earth and runs into Dennis. He catches Ivy as she comes off stage and in her dressing room after she is turned down for an audition. He asks her to come and record a song for them. After Ellis records the song and it is posted online, Tom fires him. After the reviews for the song are great, Ellis confronts him and asks for Tom to take him back. He does and shares his ideas, playing the 'baseball' number. Tom and Julia are confronted by Eileen who wants to produce the musical. She also suggests that they have Derek direct it, much to Tom's disgust. When they begin to audition for the musical, he asks Ivy to audition, thinking that they should just give her the part. Levitt is an American composer and director for theatre, best known for his collaborations with playwright and lyricist Julia Houston. He wrote the music for Bombshell and Heaven on Earth, winning a Tony Award with Houston for their Bombshell score. Levitt got his first big break when Kristin Chenoweth performed a song of his on the Rosie O'Donnell Show. Tom is seen as being tired most of the time, usually snapping at or being unintentionally rude to people he may work with. With his friends, he has an excellent sense of humor, and it’s actually very awkward when he doesn’t have the upper hand in social situations. He gets extremely nervous around men, describing himself as a “hopeless romantic” who frequently gets crushes on most men he meets. He knows when to and not to joke around with certain people, being very smart when it comes to helping people out. Tom is very upfront about his feelings, whether it involves his latest crush, his preference for Ivy over Karen, or his impression of his current musical partnership. He finds it hard to separate his strong opinions from the task at hand, and also has trouble correcting others and keeping them in line when he is in charge of Bombshell. He finds it easy to encourage and affirm others, and to open up about his struggles with them in an attempt to relate. Tom worries about what others will think about him, and is emboldened and elated when others think well of him or praise his work. He is more open to “changing, adapting, and altering” his work than Julia, because he is all about compromising to keep the peace. He has a fascination for “old things,” and memories that tie him to the past; his own experiences with people and his interactions with them all influence his decisions in the present (and often give him a “bias”). Tom is attentive to the details of the musical score and the plot of their musicals, and doesn’t mind handling the more mundane aspects of being a composer or director. He invites everyone to throw their ideas into the mix, and considers all of them with open-minded interest. He brings a lot creatively to the table when discussing ideas, but is rarely tied down to just one way of doing something. Limitations or being unable to change things do not appeal to him. Though he is a good judge of character, able to pinpoint flaws in others and tell them in gentle but firm terms what hypocrites they can be, Tom finds it harder to do that to himself. He impulsively leaps in to “people please,” and then second-guesses himself later, when he has to step back from his emotions and realize that was the wrong decision.

Julia Houston

Julia Houston is a bookwriter and lyricist best known for her joint ventures with her friend and colleague Tom Levitt. Marilyn: The Musical was her brainchild, and she is working with composer Tom (along with his assistant, Ellis Tancharoen), director Derek Wills, and producer Eileen Rand to bring her idea to life on stage. There is so much tension between Julia and her husband Frank, as they are in the process of adopting a child and Frank knows a new project will take up a lot of her time. Julia had an affair with Michael Swift and he is still in love with her. After a while they realised that this would hurt both of their families so they soon decided to stop when Michael swift got cut from Bombshell. Even though Julia broke off her affair, she and her husband (Frank) still had troubles and by the end of season 2, they decide to get a divorce. Julia returns to her former lover Michael Swift after she won a Tony for Best Score with Tom. Julia relies a lot on her subjective interpretation of Marilyn Monroe’s life (on stereotypes, archetypes, the mythology of Marily, and her personal feelings of admiration and empathy for her) when writing Bombshell. Her first approach is to take it on a surface level, and it takes other creative writers to shake her out of the obvious and descend into the symbolic. She is somewhat resistant to change, either in her personal life (her divorce, her break-up with her writing partner) or in her work. Affirmation and encouragement mean a lot to her, as does success; she wants to be acknowledged as good at what she does, and seeks input from others a great deal, through offering her feelings and inviting them to comment on them. Julia feels an enormous amount of guilt over her affair. She tends to emotionally react to things whenever confronted by them; being slighted, humiliated, or criticized in public is devastating to her. But she can also change her mind, given the right circumstances, and with enough convincing from others that she is making the right choice. She wants to understand Marilyn fully, to get inside her head, to comprehend what motivated her and what emotions poured out of her toward other people; Julia analyzes her behavior, Tom’s behavior, Marilyn’s behavior… everyone’s behavior, all the time. She questions her own motives and ideas. She can also pull apart a problem, figure out why something is not working, and “rig” a solution that improves the project overall, in a short amount of time. Her creativity is impressive and oriented toward her work, often guided and directed in specific directions; Julia can spin her wheels for awhile until someone sparks a new angle for her, which she can then excitedly carry on to completion (changing Bombshell, so it is a portrait of Marilyn through the eyes of the men in her life, rather than Marilyn’s perspective). She is somewhat leery of abandoning her “safe zones” and going into the unknown without a safety net.