Making Marilyn - Review

Horatio’s Bar, Brighton

***

Written by Julie Burchill & Dan Raven

Directed by Carole Todd

Making Marilyn that played for three nights at the Brighton Fringe this week, is the fusion of some remarkable writing combined with one of the more outstanding performances to have been seen this year.

Suzie Kennedy is Marilyn Monroe in Julie Burchill and Dan Raven’s play that gives a voice to one of the most enigmatic women of the 20th century.

The plot projects Marilyn into a dialogue set in the modern era and through Burchill’s incisive analysis, offers us the chance to hear Monroe give her take on her tragically short life, reflecting on her achievements and her experience of exploitation. Set against what the #MeToo movement has highlighted about Hollywood, Monroe’s words offer much to contemplate - and Kennedy’s performance in both sound and appearance, is astonishing. As the star remarks that she was “better at being a personality than a person” there is much to reflect upon, and her coruscating critique of Elton John’s Candle In The Wind is brilliant.

The play’s underlying vehicle however is creaky. Two time-travellers from 2024 (Josh and Candy, played by Luke O’Dell and Kirsty Brewster-Brown) are sent back to the 1960s to collect a sample of Monroe’s DNA to bring back to the future so that replicant Marilyns can be cloned for today’s rich and powerful. Candy is perhaps the more interesting of the pair with Josh’s character proving ham-fisted, weighed down with too many clumsy references to his onanistic adulation of Monroe.

Think H.G.Wells meets Back To The Future, combined with The Boys From Brazil but lacking that trio’s carefully crafted approach to science fiction. The evening offers an overly ambitious storyline that ultimately defies credibility, letting our suspended disbelief crash to the floor as the narrative cries out for the nuclear-powered intensity of Doc Brown’s flux capacitor.

The play needs a lot of work. But Burchill and Raven’s interpretation of Monroe is little short of genius and in Suzie Kennedy’s voicing of the star, all three have truly been making Marilyn.

Back To The Future The Musical - Review

Adelphi Theatre, London

*****

Music and lyrics by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard

Book by Bob Gale

Directed by John Rando

Olly Dobson

In a dramatic gesture matched only in magnitude by the invention of the flux capacitor itself, so have the cast and creative team behind Back To The Future The Musical delivered one of the best new musicals to hit the West End in recent years.

Bravely opening as the pandemic (hopefully) fades, the Adelphi was packed to a cheering audience savouring a show that wasn’t just based upon a classic 1985 movie but which takes that film’s narrative to a fourth dimension amidst a veritable nuclear-powered fusion of effects wizardry, video projection, and good old-fashioned human talent.

It’s not just a tough gig to set a science-fiction yarn to music, Back To The Future also demands of its leads that they can inhabit characters including the leads that were so memorably brought to life on screen by Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox . This show however pulls it off with an inspired casting that sees accomplished Broadway actor Roger Bart create the stage version of Doc Brown. Opposite Bart, Olly Dobson is equally convincing as teenage time-traveller Marty McFly.

Nearly 40 years old, the story is a classic. Marty gets sent back in time 30 years by the madcap inventor Brown, where he stumbles across his pre-marital parents. And as his youthfully gorgeous mother Lorraine (Rosanna Hyland) falls for the new kid in town, unaware of course that he is her son, it is down to Marty and the (younger, naturally) Doc to engineer the plot that sees Lorraine fall for her unlikely suitor George McFly, so that in time the pair can marry and beget Marty… 

Roger Bart

Throughout, the acting is flawless, not least with Hugh Coles’ George McFly, a veritable masterpiece of physical comedy. Coles’ perfect interpretation of the hapless George delivers not only perfectly timed hilarity but also immaculately pitched nuance that must surely stand him in good stead when the Olivier for Best Supporting Actor is being considered. There is pathos too in the bond between Marty and the Doc - again, never milked, just perfectly pitched.

And, for the most part, the show’s new songs are also rather clever. In a time when new musical theatre writing can often disappoint, the numbers created here combine humour and passion together with perfectly pitched insight into the human condition. Hello - Is Anybody Home? as Marty gazes despairingly at his (1985) family, is matched in wit by his (youthful) dad’s My Myopia. Whichever of Silvestri or Ballard thought to rhyme myopia with utopia is another deeply talented soul.

Actors and lyrics aside, Back To The Future has always been about the car! So much more than just a ripping yarn, what is needed here has been the translation of a 20th century blockbuster movie crammed full of (non-CGI) special effects and squeezing it into the confines of a proscenium arch, beyond which is a theatre brimming with the expectations of a tech-savvy 21st century audience.

Director John Rando pulls off this task magnificently – aided by Tim Hatley’s design work, Chris Fisher’s illusions, Finn Ross outstanding video projections (Doc Brown’s climbing of the clock tower towards the show’s finale is a hilarious coup-de-theatre in itself!), Gareth Owen’s sound design and Tim Lutkin’s lighting. The staging is imaginative, stunning and clearly expensive – everything that a big West End show should be – and, above all, imaginative. There will be no spoilers in this review – just go and savour what these guys manage to do with a classy company of actors and a DeLorean. (And if this 2021 iteration of the story sees those pesky Libyan terrorists from 1985 get canned in the name of politically correct progress, well hey that's showbiz!)

Jim Henson’s 14 piece band make fine work of the newly scored stuff – theres a great leitmotif running through the show that is a nod to the movie – with the more recent songs standing up well to the timeless gems of Johnny B. Goode and Huey Lewis’ The Power Of Love. The dancework is wonderfully tight too, with choreographer Chris Bailey lobbing in some wonderful moments of pastiche that only add to the evening's splendour.  

It says much for London as a global centre of theatre that the producers have chosen to workshop and launch this All-American show over here and with a predominantly British company of cast and creatives. As soon as circumstances make it possible and profitable, the show deserves a swift transfer across the Atlantic. 

Throughout, Back To The Future The Musical exceeds expectations, consistently delivering excellence in acting, song, dance, and oh, those effects.  Family entertainment in musical theatre does not get better than this. Just go!

Booking until 1st July 2022

Photo credit: Sean Ebsworth Barnes