Guide to Marilyn Monroe musicals on Broadway and beyond, including 'Smash'

The iconic actress never appeared on Broadway, but she's immortalized in plays and musicals about her life as well as musical adaptations of her classic films.

Can you contain the shine of a megastar on a stage? The screen actress and singer Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), born Norma Jeane Mortenson, enraptured audiences with her dreamy smile, silky cadence, and longing pout in films — the drama All About Eve, the noir Niagara, the musicals Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There's No Business Like Show Business, and more — before her tragic death at 36.

“People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person,” Monroe said in her posthumously published autobiography, My Story. Surviving trauma in childhood and Hollywood, Monroe endured a life more dimensional than the sensationalized headlines and sexualized “dumb blonde” reputation. No wonder so many books and movies try to capture her in all her complexity.

While Monroe never appeared on Broadway, many plays, operas, and musicals would also attempt to capture the radiance of the late actress through bio-shows or stagings of her most famous films. Most recent is Smash, a Broadway musical adapted from the NBC TV show about the making of a fictional Marilyn musical, Bombshell. Check out more stage projects from Broadway and beyond that resurrect the essence of Marilyn Monroe and her stardom.

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Marilyn!

In 1983, Marilyn! The Musical premiered in London. It was a vehicle for actress Stephanie Lawrence, a former Evita, to reunite with director Larry Fuller. John De Vito's book The Immortal Marilyn says Lawrence at least survived the critically panned production “smelling like an English rose.”

Lawrence’s obituary in The Guardian would later lament that the musical did not keep up with her talents: “She not only captured the externals of Marilyn Monroe — the wiggle, the walk, the passionate pout, the vocal breathiness — but conveyed the carmined innocence and soft vulnerability within.”

Marilyn: An American Fable

A separate Marilyn musical opened on Broadway the same year. Ken Mandelbaum’s book Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops documented Marilyn: An American Fable as a camp classic. The show ran for 51 total performances at the Minskoff Theatre in 1983.

In this musical, Marilyn was followed by a Greek chorus named Destiny. Mandelbaum mentions a ridiculous line where Marilyn tells her third husband, “But you're Arthur Miller! How can you be so boring?" The musical ends happily, as Marilyn reunites with her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, and walks off into the sunset with a young Norma Jeane.

Marilyn had the approval of Monroe’s acting coach, Anna Strasberg, bringing it as close to an “authorized” Marilyn Monroe musical as it could get. But it was beset with various creative changes, including the replacement of lead actress Gerolyn Petchel with Alyson Reed, whom Mandelbaum called “gallant and touching.”

Norma Jeane The Musical

“I have to come clean about being Norma Jeane.”

T.L. Shannon authored the Norma Jeane the Musical, whose official summary reads: “In the dark days of 1961, eighteen months before she died, Marilyn Monroe was sent to a psychiatric unit when she thought she was being sent to a spa for rest and relaxation."

The premise targets the darker shades of Monroe’s life, and the show is framed within Norma Jeane's hallucinations in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Centre. The musical ran in the summer of 2016 at the Lost Theatre in south London. You can listen to the track “Time to Come Clean About Norma Jeane.”

Sugar

“Well, you see, I’m not very bright,” the sumptuous Sugar explains in the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, for which Monroe won a Golden Globe for Best Actress. Directed by Billy Wilder, the Prohibition-set movie follows musicians Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who witness a mob execution and escape in disguise with a women's band. The film was transgressive for its time, contributing to the end of the Hays Code.

The movie has received two Broadway musical treatments. First was 1972's Sugar, by Funny Girl's Jule Styne and Bob Merrill (score) and Peter Stone (book). Sugar received four Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical, despite mixed reviews. Reviewer Harold Clurman praised stars Robert Morse, Tony Roberts, and Elaine Joyce but concluded, “As for the rest—who cares!”

Some Like It Hot

A new Some Like It Hot musical premiered in 2022 at the Shubert Theatre. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (score) and Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin (book) updated the musical with a queer lens, transforming Jerry/Daphne's arc as one of self-discovery. J. Harrison Ghee, who played the role, made history as one of the first openly non-binary actors to win a Tony Award.

Shaiman and Wittman incorporated “Let’s Be Bad,” a song from their TV show Smash, into Some Like It Hot. Speaking of which...

Smash (TV show)

Stealing hearts with the Emmy-winning song “Let Me Be Your Star,” the two-season Smash chronicles the development of a Marilyn Monroe bio-musical, Bombshell, for Broadway. Diva Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and ingénue Karen (Katharine McPhee) compete for the lead role, and the actresses’ lives and personalities are treated as different components of Monroe’s psyche. The show addresses the dilemma of dramatizing Monroe without sensationalizing or objectifying her.

A full-fledged stage version of Bombshell was announced but never manifested. However, the Smash cast — which also includes Debra Messing, Christian Borle, Jack Davenport, Anjelica Huston, and more — reprised their roles for a 2015 Bombshell benefit concert. A Bombshell soundtrack is also available to stream.

Smash (Broadway musical)

Upon its 2025 Broadway premiere on the Imperial Theatre, Smash got a major makeover under director Susan Stroman and bookwriters Bob Martin and Rick Elice. The story still follows a Broadway company tinkering with their troubled Bombshell production before opening night, and the musical retains most of Shaiman and Wittman's songs from the TV show.

However, the musical overhauls the plot and players for a comedy-driven take. In Smash on Broadway, the mishaps kick off when Ivy (Robyn Hurder) resorts to extreme Method acting — that is, acting like Marilyn at all times — and ruins team morale. Bombshell director Nigel (2025 Tony Award nominee Brooks Ashmanskas) invokes debates between creating a “weepy Marilyn Monroe bio” and a more celebratory angle on Marilyn's life.

Some Smash TV alums returned for Broadway alongside Shaiman and Wittman. Krysta Rodriguez plays writer Tracy, a departure from her television character, an actress named Ana. Joshua Bergasse, an Emmy winner for his Smash choreography, earned a Tony nomination for choreographing the Broadway show.

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Dead Outlaw

This musical is not about Marilyn Monroe, but her name and spirit get a brief, darkly comedic cameo. Dead Outlaw follows the commodified mummy of bandit Elmer McCurdy, who ended up on the examining table of real-life coroner Thomas Noguchi. The "Coroner to the Stars" is known for examining the cadavers of numerous celebrities, including Monroe.

In the song "Up to the Stars," Noguchi's character sings: "Marilyn Monroe, when she left the show, came to my table not long ago. Our final scene, me and Norma Jean: end of the fable, tag on her toe."

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Marilyn Monroe operas

The larger-than-life Marilyn Monroe inspired numerous operas as well.

• 1980: Lorenzo Ferrero made his breakthrough with Marilyn. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera described the opera as a “populist musical idiom and collage of elements of Marilyn Monroe's private life and of public events (the Korean War, the McCarthy investigations, etc).”
• 1993: Composer Ezra Laderman and librettist Norman Rosten penned their own Marilyn. Per The New York Times, the opera depicted vignettes from Monroe’s life in 1962.
• 2010: Librettist Marilyn Bowering and composer Gavin Bryars wrote Marilyn Forever for Long Beach Opera. The opera opens with Marilyn’s death as a framing device.