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It was lampooned as the union of the “hourglass” and the “egghead” – the marriage, in the summer of 1956, between Hollywood superstar Marilyn Monroe and Pulitzer-winning playwright Arthur Miller. Now, a new stage musical is to give a nuanced and intimate portrait of that famous relationship, treat each as trailblazers in their own way and reveal parallels between the volatile state of the US during the 50s “red scare” and now.
The production, which opens next autumn at Leicester’s Curve, is called Misfits Together, a reference to the film Miller wrote for Monroe that was released shortly after their divorce in 1961. It is a foray into musical theatre by two indie musicians, Dan Smith of the band Bastille and Ralph Pelleymounter from To Kill a King, who have recorded the score as a studio album. The first track, Oh America, is out on Thursday.
Smith and Pelleymounter had originally envisaged it as a musical about 50s America. They shared their songs with Charlotte Bogard Macleod, who has written the book, and had long been fascinated by the relationship that caught the public’s imagination.
“I’d always wanted to explore Arthur Miller and how he had this integrity that cut through everything,” she said. “He refused to name names [before the House Un-American Activities Committee] and he stood up at a huge personal cost. When we started doing research, we just couldn’t believe that Marilyn was so central to this. She was supporting him. She had her own production company. And we were thinking, why hasn’t this been talked about or celebrated?” Each empowered the other, she added – “fighting [the anti-communist senator Joe] McCarthy or fighting misogyny”.
Smith said that the musical would deal with how Monroe was pigeonholed. “Here’s a working-class woman who was in foster care and created the persona of Marilyn Monroe and became one of the most successful and known people ever in the world,” he said. “And still at the height of her success and fame, she was constantly questioned and denigrated and patronised.”
Despite her many achievements, Monroe had been “reduced and reduced and reduced” to the image of a bombshell, Pelleymounter said. The musical, he added, would look at how her fame eclipsed Miller’s.
Presented with Tila Arts, Misfits Together will be staged by Curve’s artistic director, Nikolai Foster, who said the company had been watching Monroe’s films for research. He praised her “innate understanding of the art of film-making” and “the craft of acting”. Foster said the musical showed the couple’s lives in such closeup that at times during the workshops they almost forgot that the main characters were two of the 20th century’s most famous cultural figures.
Pelleymounter said he had returned to the phrase “history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” throughout their work on the project. Seventy years after the red scare, othering was still being used to create “fear and anger in order to maintain the status quo” in the US, he said. One song written for the musical expresses Miller and film director Elia Kazan’s frustration at “seeing politicians say things on the news that are so blatantly not true, that are manipulative and scaremongering”.
Other famous figures in the musical include Laurence Olivier, Monroe’s co-star in The Prince and the Showgirl. “He says: ‘Stop trying to act, just be sexy,’” said Bogard Macleod. “His one note is: ‘Be sexy!’ He was frustrated with her wanting lots of takes, and she was just trying to get it right. But then when you see the film, she’s the one that shines.”
Smith and Pelleymounter wrote more than three dozen songs for the film and have been whittling them down to under half that number. The pair, longtime friends, “have always loved writing narrative songs and using songwriting to dive into character and story and history and culture”, said Smith. “I want the songs to be epic and instant and nuanced and move the story along, to sweep across history and then zoom into someone’s psychology.”
One song takes surprising inspiration from Eminem’s hit Stan, as it tells an “incredibly complex story via their correspondence”. Pelleymounter said they had also drawn inspiration from famous photos of the pair. “Bicycle rides have definitely made it into at least one song.”
Pelleymounter and Smith will be following in the footsteps of fellow indie musician Passenger (Michael David Rosenberg), who recently had a musical theatre success with the Olivier award-nominated The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Smith has also written the music and lyrics for Young Romantics, a musical in development whose characters include Mary Shelley and Lord Byron.
