MARILYN: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE ICON by Andrea Milton-Furlotti at Upstairs at the Gatehouse 12 – 24 May 2026
‘The icon we know; the woman stays hidden’★★
Dick Van Dyke, the eternal chimney sweep, turned 100 last year, and Mel Brooks of Young Frankenstein fame will, all being well, reach his centenary next month. Eva Marie Saint, the oldest living Oscar winner, is 101. And, had her flame not burned out at 36, Marilyn Monroe would have joined the Hollywood hundred club on 1 June.
Which gives us the conceit for this short musical skim through the highlights and background of the career, life, loves and lows, very low lows, of a woman with a claim to have been the most famous in the world in her time.
Her 100-year-old ghost (played by Donna King) looks back on her life as scenes from it play briefly before her, young Marilyn (Alice Mayer, largely clad in the white dress familiar from Seven Year Itch) sprinting from schoolgirl to model to starlet to icon.
The music’s good (Tom Fowkes), inventive and sprightly, if not particularly representative of any particular era of Marilyn’s 15 years of fame, though the singing isn’t strong. The show suffers in other respects from a script that simply skims every surface, like a Wikipedia entry but without the links we could click to find who, say, Joe Di Maggio or Arthur Miller or Paula Strasbourg were or why they mattered either to Marilyn or to anyone else.
It’s a curious paradox that anyone who knows anything about Marilyn will learn nothing new while anyone who knows nothing at all about her will learn nothing at all. There’s simply too much incident (one thing after another) and too little context or explanation to give the actors, most playing multiple roles, much room to develop character or relationship in scenes without link or milieu.
Ultimately, Marilyn is the icon hiding little Norma Jean, Di Maggio and Miller the eminences in their own fields discombobulated by finding themselves in her glowing shadow, and so the sun rises and the tides flow. The promise of the frame – a century-old Marilyn reviewing her life – doesn’t come to much as her ghost simply narrates events and the narrative ends when she does in 1962.
The icon, the incredible icon, we know and can see; the woman sadly stays hidden as a brief 70 minutes flickers out.
MARILYN: THE WOMAN BEHIND THE ICON by Andrea Milton-Furlotti at Upstairs at the Gatehouse 12 – 24 May 2026
Music by Tom Fowkes and Andrea Milton-Furlotti
Directed by Andrea Milton-Furlotti
Box Office: https://www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com
Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow) and Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London). His novel The Honourable Member for Murder will be published in August by Allison and Busby
