I can't imagine anyone "doing" a better Marilyn Monroe. With the tousled blonde hair and luminescent skin on a curvaceous figure, Sunny Thompson has the sex icon down pat. With her mix of breathy and breathless voice, she relates her biog to a photographer (our surrogate). It's supposedly her last photo shoot before death from an overdose. She's wrapped in a sheet on a big central bed surrounded by lights, both the symbol of her life and the scenic metaphor of Marilyn, Forever Blonde!
In seemingly endless array, she goes through husbands (from age 16) and sexual partners (she liked "doing it"). Lots of quickies too. They were the key ("Everyone did it") to starring in stills as well as that famous nude calendar, and to landing most of her films. She and Sunny Thompson make a good case, though, for the talent she developed for singing and comedy (as well as making out with co-stars and other stars).
Life, however, was far from funny or the good fortune that comedy always enjoys in the end. Marilyn resented studio moguls and the press for what she considered exploitation. We get little sense from her words of why she liked dominating types of men, her struggles in New York to learn to act (or how well she did in lessons), her seeking therapy, and the reasons (or people?) behind her taking to drink and drugs.
We mainly see Marilyn in this play as we do Sunny Thompson, deftly narrating or singing downstage center or nude under sheets and -- during umpteen changes of clothes -- behind a screen, in outline and shadow. "All I ever wanted was to be [pause] wonderful!" says Marilyn early on. As with this show, some will think that describes her; others, that she and it as a play fall short. Sunny, though, is a pause that almost refreshes both.
