Who Killed Marilyn is a new play that sets out to put Marilyn at the centre of her own story, sweep aside everything you may have heard about her and her untimely death and discover what really happened to her. It’s an interesting premise, especially for someone who has had over 600 books written about them, so I was keen to see how this show would put a fresh angle on one of the world’s most famous women.
Written by Sharleen Cooper Cohen, the play fails to live up to the idea of removing Marilyn’s victim status and, like many other stories about Marilyn, it puts the men she is with at the centre of the plot. We spend large parts of the play looking at her relationships with Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller and the Kennedy brothers, yet we are simply told in passing about how intelligent she is and her love of reading. This never really becomes part of the plot or her journey. This also highlights a wider problem with the book: the audience are often simply told something about Marilyn rather than left to discover and make their own mind up about her as a woman, which in turn means that these statements are unsupported and have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Despite this, there is a lot of interesting content in the show and Cooper Cohen’s passion and interest in Marilyn’s life comes across.
The idea of looking at how or why she was killed again has lots of promise, but it doesn’t always go hand in hand with the agency that the show promises to give Marilyn, as the reasons are consistently linked back to the men she is with. Equally, for a show that sets out to pose answers to this question, there is a large part of the play spent on Marilyn’s earlier relationships which have tenuous, at best, links to her cause of death.
Despite the weaker book, Pixie Lott as Marilyn throws herself into the role with a wonderful interpretation of her, mimicking her voice and her body language well. She is unmistakably Marilyn every single moment she is on stage and is the best thing about this production. The rest of the cast, however, fail to live up to Lott’s standard and it becomes difficult to see what Marilyn saw in the likes of the Kennedy brothers, with other characters simply becoming caricatures of what people assume mob bosses are like.
The design of the show also lets it down and director Philip Wm. McKinley has ignored the fact that it is not staged in a simple proscenium theatre and, as such, those on the sides of the theatre miss out on some of the expressions. Equally, the show is often lit very darkly, with a huge reliance on small pools of light and the actors being in exactly the right place to catch the action. Finally, the costume design by Jasmine Swan left me confused. The men’s attire throughout was designed to look as if they had ink, dirt or something similar on them, but I was unable to fathom the meaning behind this.
Who Killed Marilyn has an intriguing premise and there is clearly a huge amount of research and passion behind the production. Unfortunately, in trying to uncover the truth about Marilyn, the show ultimately falls into the very trap it sets out to avoid, with the men around her continuing to dominate her story. Pixie Lott gives a committed performance and there are interesting ideas within the script, but I left feeling that I had learnt more about the men in Marilyn’s life than Marilyn herself.
Who Killed Marilyn is on at the Emerald Theatre until 29th October. You can find out more and book tickets here.
If you like this review you might also like my review of Death Note, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Comedy About Spies.