After a brief look at her facing discrimination and resistance at the university, we get to Marie meeting her future husband Pierre Curie (Thomas Josling,) who's looking for a research assistant and is impressed by more than just her radically ambitious ideas for experiments.
Discovering two new elements and winning two Nobel prizes, the Curies become a sensation in the scientific community, but the focus of the story is on the later stages of their career when Radium has been discovered and is being treated as the new wonder ingredient for everything from chocolate to toothpaste. Marie becomes fixated on the idea that it can be used to treat cancerous tumours - the early development of radiotherapy - and doesn't notice that her patron Ruben DeLong (Richard Meek) is covering up the horrific deaths of workers in their Radium factories.
I don't know if Korea has a home-grown tradition of musical theatre, but on the evidence of Marie Curie it would seem the answer is either no, or that it's so different they don't think Western ears are ready for it yet. Because the tradition Choi and Choun have followed is very much Broadway, with particular influence from Schwartz, Lloyd Webber and Disney. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but while it's a more than competent addition to the genre, with a very strong opening number and a rousing finale (which I found a bit reminiscent of "With One Look,") I thought all the songs in between were pretty samey and rote.
Not to say that Sarah Meadows' production isn't consistently entertaining, well-handled by Davidson as a curious lead: The story very much places her as the true genius of the pair, but Pierre a bit more of the human side of the operation; Marie is a little bit too laser-focused on her work to see the bigger picture and entirely connect even with the people she cares about, and her (correct) suspicion that Radium can be used to heal leads her to ignore the signs that it can also hurt.
Initially underused, Bhima comes into her own as Anne movingly becomes the face of those dying of Radium poisoning as, in what's meant to be a kindness, Marie got her a well-paid job on the factory floor. Even her friend's illness isn't enough to make her accept the side-effects of her discovery. Marie's ability to separate her emotions from her work finally come in handy when Pierre dies of an unrelated accident, and she performs an autopsy that proves how much damage exposure to Radium had caused a seemingly healthy man.
There's a few too many elements the books tells, rather than shows: We have to take it on faith that Marie was, despite her focus on work, a good mother; and apart from the early bullying and the odd moment later in the show (the Nobel prize is awarded "to Pierre Curie and his wife,") we have to take the finale's word for how much misogyny dominated her life. This is overall a flawed but perfectly serviceable Broadway-style biographical musical with a darker side, performed strongly by the cast and livened up by Joanna Goodwin's choreography. But with much of the early publicity focusing on the novelty of a South Korean musical coming to London I was hoping to see at least a hint of that come across: I don't think the cultural explosion of recent years would have happened in the same way if Korean artists had just perfectly copied Western music or TV without a twist of their own, and it's that twist that might have really elevated Marie Curie.
Marie Curie by Jongyoon Choi and Seeun Choun, in a version by Tom Ramsey and Emma Fraser, is booking until the 28th of July at the Charing Cross Theatre.
Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Pamela Raith.
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