Blonde ambition: Staging Marilyn Monroe

The denizens of "Smash," NBC's new show about the making of a Broadway musical aren't the first -- and surely won't be the last -- to attempt to make art and/or entertainment about Marilyn Monroe.

The closest Broadway has come to the "Smash" kind of big hagiographic musical was "Marilyn: An American Fable," which had just 34 previews and 17 performances in 1983. This production, which changed Marilyns and directors during its troubled development, had the young Norma Jean interacting with her grown-up self.

That same year, London had "Marilyn! The Musical," And in 2009, London also saw a short-lived dance musical by the same people who did one about Princess Diana in 2005.

Of course, Arthur Miller raised disapproving eyebrows -- twice -- in his two barely disguised plays about his failed marriage to Monroe. "After the Fall," first on Broadway in 1964, was a nonlinear drama set in the mind of a New York intellectual. In 2004, months before Miller died, Chicago's Goodman Theatre unveiled his last play, "Finishing the Picture" -- a backstage almost-farce about the making of "The Misfits," the 1961 existential Western Miller wrote for Monroe at the end of their tumultuous marriage. It never got to New York.

And the New York City Opera also got a crack at Monroe in 1993 with "Marilyn," an opera with flashbacks about her final months with a politician presumably based on Robert F. Kennedy.