Good-bye Miss Monroe

Good-bye Miss Monroe
By Liam de Burca. danceAtlas production. Director: Liam de Burca. Metro Arts, Brisbane. 7-22 March 2014

Good-bye Miss Monroe is a play that tells the story of “forgotten legend” Hollywood dance-director Jack Cole and takes place in the days following Marilyn Monroe’s tragic suicide in 1962. Cole, who worked with Monroe on six of her movies, was a friend and confidante of the star. The play, set in Cole’s Hollywood Hills home, not only sketches in his working relationship with Monroe but also with Rita Hayworth, Jane Russell, Betty Grable and Gwen Verdon.

Cole, a dance pioneer, is credited with inventing American show dancing known as “theatrical jazz dance.” Unknown today, but a visionary in his time, his influence can be found in the work of modern musical theatre greats Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse who followed. Gwen Verdon was his assistant at Columbia studios in the 1940s where he ran a de-facto ballet school on the lot.

Liam de Burca’s play effectively juggles the fascinating pieces of Cole’s story using two skilled actors. Matt Young’s unsentimental but honest portrayal of Cole manages to hold the stage in his many soliloquies directed at the audience and is a effective foil for the multiple muses of his co-star, Anna Burgess. She brings Verdon, Grable and Russell gloriously to life but it was her performance as Monroe that was the highlight. Nuanced and at the same time reverential, Burgess perfectly captured Monroe’s famed luminosity.

Special mention should go to Elia Massimini’s wigs and de Burca’s costumes which helped create the mystique of these legendary movie queens.

Several of Cole’s choreographic routines added to the show’s appeal; Gwen Verdon’s Egyptian Dance from the 1951 movie David and Bathsheba, and “Sing, Sing, Sing” originally included in Cole’s 1930s club act, which was used as a finale. de Buca’s direction was amazingly fluent considering Metro Arts’ postage stamp-sized stage.

Apart from being a hard task-master and prone to fits of temper and abuse, very little of Cole’s personal life emerged, a pity because we wanted to know more.

Good-bye Miss Monroe feels like its future could well be in the U.S. where the cult and obsession of all things Monroe is much larger than it is in Australia. Although its appeal is immediate to dance enthusiasts, Cole’s story still has enough interest for a broader audience and definitely, with this cast, deserves to be seen in Sydney, Melbourne and other cities.

Peter Pinne         

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