Misfits Together: A New Musical Explores the Artistic Partnership of Monroe and Miller

There's a new musical heading to Leicester's Curve next autumn that promises to do something most Monroe-Miller dramatizations shy away from: take them both seriously as artists, not tabloid shorthand. According to The Guardian, "Misfits Together" comes from Dan Smith of Bastille and Ralph Pelleymounter of To Kill a King, with a book by Charlotte Bogard Macleod — three songwriters trading pop hooks for stagecraft, and somehow making the leap look effortless.

The premise, without the usual hagiography

The title nods at the film Miller wrote for Monroe, released shortly after their 1961 divorce. The show itself lives in 1956, the summer they married, smack inside the "red scare." Smith and Pelleymounter recorded the score as a proper studio album — which tells you everything about how they think. Albums, not curtain calls. "Oh America" lands Thursday as the first single.

What hooked me is the framing. The creative team isn't chasing the "bombshell" version of Monroe. They want both halves of the couple treated as trailblazers, with Monroe's own production company and her quiet backbone during Miller's stand against the House Un-American Activities Committee finally getting their dramatic due. One song captures director Elia Kazan and Miller's frustration at politicians saying "things on the news that are so blatantly not true." That line is going to land harder in 2026 than anyone expected when the demos were cut.

Why the workshop energy matters

Curve's artistic director Nikolai Foster is directing, and his note that the team sometimes forgot they were developing two of the 20th century's most recognizable figures tells you the whole vibe. No wax-museum biopic. Just two complicated humans under one roof in a country busy deciding who got to be American. Pelleymounter reportedly keeps circling back to "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes" — and watching 1950s McCarthyism rhyme with today's headlines is half the point.

If you want the temperature right before opening night, rewatch "The Prince and the Showgirl." Olivier's reported "Stop trying to act, just be sexy" line to Monroe apparently resurfaces in the show as a moment of pointed critique — proof the book knows exactly whose mythology it's dismantling. And if you're curious how the rest of the industry is bracing for change, the broader business forces reshaping Hollywood right now — federal incentive pushes, tariff talk — make for quite the backdrop.

Watch this if you liked

For famous-people-rendered-as-humans, queue "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans" — same beat, sharper teeth. For 1950s paranoia married to modern moral rot, "The Morning Show" delivers, less song-and-dance, more boardroom carnage. And if the album drops before the show lands in Leicester, stream it first — Smith and Pelleymounter built it to live on its own. Then book the train.