For the second English speaking spex this academic year students flooded the basement of Kalmar nation for the finale of Marilyn Monroe: The truth is out there.
This fantastical tale of cold war tensions and interplanetary warfare, transports the viewer to an alternate reality, in which nothing is quite as it seems. Dr Zeuss guides the audience, quite literally at times holding the show together, through the set piece sketches and parody songs.
The spex began with the mousey Martian sibling duo, Stilton and Cheddar, travelling to Earth after suspecting that Marilyn is also a Martian! Both jittering imbeciles attempt to simultaneously find true love and explore Earth’s delights in an effort to distract themselves from the extinction of the rest of their species at the hands of the Uranians. The first half of the show manages to incorporate a bizarre mixture of the X-files, Russian gladnosk and 60’s Americana. The star of the first act without a doubt was Marilyn Monroe herself, played by Erin Murphy. With her extremely charismatic stage presence and delightfully accurate character portrayal, Murphy had Monroe down to the last eyelash flutter. Another mention should go to Khrushchev’s eyebrows (kudos to the makeup team), which impressively grew into a self-styled Soviet Uni-brow.
Keeping with spex tradition the audience was encouraged to call out “retake!” at any particularly funny sketch, followed by the actors re-performing a slightly alternative version of the act. This posed potential for comedic build up and some pretty awesome climaxes as well as a few nosedives. The lewd moments where the most repeated, with the extremely stylistically caricature mimed sex scenes between Khrushchev and his robot wife, being the most hilarious.
Act II attempted to build upon the impressive momentum from the first act. However things started to drag a little in terms of plot pacing and the comedic content. Never more has Uranus been so overexploited for its limited comedic potential. Despite these quibbles, it was clear that the cast was having a whale of a time on their last night and the audience continued to feed off this energy and enjoy it immensely. The musical interludes throughout the show, despite feeling very karaoke at times, added extra spice to a particularly raunchy production. Apart from the package size jokes wearing thin (and a rather awkward scene involving grossly lewd finger licking,) the shameless use of vulgarity throughout the show appeared to go down a treat with the audience. A native Swede was overheard to comment that a Swedish only production would never dare to be so risqué and utilise quite so much base humour.
All in all much laughter was had throughout the pretty long evening. As another year of drama comes to a close at Kalmar the overwhelmed cast literally buzzed with energy as they sang the last song. While most of the audience appeared to leave with a sense of satisfaction, after witnessing some pretty spectacularly funny moments.
Text: Tom Dowling and Laura Misch
Photo: Thobias Bergström
