Many people have attempted to base a musical on the life of Marilyn Monroe, there's even been a TV show, SMASH, chronicling the trials, tribulations and triumphs of a fictional production. The songs from the programme are great and it's rumoured that we'll get a Broadway version soon. As his frame work he takes Marilyn's spell in an asylum a year or so before her death. As the drugs she's addicted to wear off, alone in her room, she hallucinates key figures and events in her life especially her dysfunctional religious family and the various men who failed to live up to being a father figure.
The show is blessed with some very fine performances. There are two Marilyn's at its centre. The emotionally battered, real life version, trying to make sense of her incarceration, is winningly played by Sarah Rose Denton who captures both the “little girl lost” and the spitting cat venom of a big star disrespected.
Working in parallel with her we have MM's on screen persona played by the beautiful and charismatic Joanne Clifton. In series of gorgeous recreations of famous frocks from her films (costume designer James Thacker) Clifton is every inch the screen goddess and is particularly fine when the show allows her to be sassy.
It's always a treat to see fringe theatre treasure Maggie Robson and on this occasion she provides a memorable cameo as MM's screwy religious nut of a mother. Handsome Joseph Bader as a wronged cousin has all the potential to develop into a very useful leading man (we've a shortage) and is a talent to watch.
It doesn't quite land as a successful musical with a future at the moment, despite perfectly serviceable songs which, even though they never tell us anything we don't know, reflect the period in a contemporary style.
The problem is that the facts of this troubled life don't give us much of a story arc. The musical starts with our leading character frightened, confused and troubled, there's two hours of awful people doing awful things to her and she ends up frightened, confused and troubled.
I think things might have taken flight a little more if designer Peter Bingemann hadn't set the whole thing in a grey, dingy, concrete cell which always keeps events, even the fantasy sequences, earthbound. I don't know but I find it hard to imagine that the studio bosses would allow one of their most valuable assets to be incarcerated in such a place. Perhaps a chic clinical all white set might have freed things up a bit. We'll never know.
There's some smart period choreography from Adam Scown and director Christopher Swann keeps things moving at a cracking pace. But the decision to play recordings of the real star singing her famous songs in the interval is a cruel one which unnecessarily invites comparisons with what's before us.
It's a real endorsement of the on stage Marilyns that, now and again, they almost measure up.
Undeniably Broadway royalty, Bernadette Peters is a charismatic, idiosyncratic performer who has had notable success in New York, giving acclaimed performance in hit productions including ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, Jerry Herman’s MACK & MABEL, Bernstein’s ON THE TOWN, THE GOODBYE GIRL and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s SONG AND DANCE but she’s most celebrated for her interpretation of the work of Stephen Sondheim and lead roles in FOLLIES, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, GYPSY, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and INTO THE WOODS. She’s also enjoyed a parallel TV and Film career and has written children’s books inspired by her love of dogs.