Becoming Marilyn Monroe

Most exhibitions about a film star put the star on the wall. This one puts the visitor inside the machine that made her.

THE PREMISE

Becoming Marilyn Monroe is a touring cultural format, produced in association with The Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC and directed by Mitch Sebastian. Its world premiere opened at Lichthalle MAAG in Zurich on 27 March 2026, in the year she would have turned a hundred.

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The entire venue operates under a single fiction: a 1950s Hollywood studio trading as MARILYN MONROE PRODUCTIONS. Staff are studio crew in cream overalls, studio logo on the lapel, exhibition logo on the back. Rooms are Departments and the way to them is stencilled on the walls. Cameras, soundstages, tungsten lights, backdrops, props and furniture, none of it a replica and all of it a contemporary reading of the original. There is no device framing the visitor as an outsider looking in, because the framing device is the building.

We call it the working-set model. The narrative is not presented to the visitor. The visitor is given a position inside it. Because the fiction lives in the fit-out and the crew rather than in one hero installation, the format can be rebuilt in the next city without losing the thing that makes it work.

THE QUESTION

What did it take to become Marilyn? The exhibition answers in labour rather than glamour. 250 images, 116 print panels and more than 120 minutes of audio were compiled and produced for the premiere. Across 1,000 square metres, eight-metre projection walls, projection mapping, original soundscapes, props and lighting put the visitor beside Marilyn on an ordinary working day. Headset audio runs in German, French and English, so the sequence holds without a fixed route and visitors move at their own pace.

FOUR DEPARTMENTS

Front Office. Box office, cloakroom, restaurant, bar, merchandise, champagne bar, makeup counter and interactive stations, plus onboarding to the exhibition app. Arrival is staged as an arrival at work.

Her Story in Black and White. Multiple rooms holding the historical record: written and photographic material in analogue form, AR stations and film. The department that keeps the facts, and deliberately the quiet one.

Main Show. An immersive multimedia show in the main studio, the Digital Promenade Theatre. Projection combined with an audio landscape of music and voice-over dialogue, carrying the audience from the Radioplane Factory to the movie sets, from Madison Square Garden to childhood. An original score inspired by American music of the 1940s and 1950s. Long meditative passages inside projected landscape, cut through with flashbacks built to jolt.

Backlot. A scenic landscape of interactive rooms where visitors take part in the process of making films, with Marilyn’s own experience running underneath it.

Her name is on the door. The last room belongs to Norma Jeane. The studio fiction is built so that the visitor arrives there having done the work rather than having been told about it.

“By the last room people aren’t looking at the icon anymore. They’re sitting with Norma Jeane, and some of them cry.” Luc Moser, New Business Director, The Storytelling Company.

WHY IT FITS STORYTELLING - CULTURE

The category asks for the translation of a story into an engaging visitor experience in the cultural space. Marilyn Monroe is more than a cultural icon. She is a story about transformation, courage and the price of being unapologetically yourself. Told through objects, that story stays behind glass. Told through a working studio, it becomes a process the visitor is standing inside, in the order it happened, with the machinery visible. Nobody leaves having looked at a life. They leave having worked a shift on one.