ABOUT

BACKGROUND
Marilyn Monroe is the most photographed woman of the twentieth century. She is also, arguably, the least understood. Every generation rebuilds its own version of her, and biographical exhibitions have tended to follow the same instinct: frame the face, arrange the dress, enlarge the publicity still. The visitor gets what they came for, which turns out to be the problem. A woman endlessly on display, with nobody ever standing next to her.

Becoming Marilyn Monroe was commissioned as a direct refusal of that instinct. The only immersive exhibition officially associated with the Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC, produced to mark her 100th birthday, the brief asked for a centenary tribute that went further than reverence: a world that treats Marilyn not as a face to admire but as a decision to understand.

IDEA & EXECUTION
Becoming Marilyn Monroe is a ninety-minute guided transformation. Visitors do not meet the icon. They meet Norma Jeane Mortenson, the young woman who refused to stay small, and they walk the distance she walked: from the quiet of her origins, through the apparatus of Hollywood that manufactured her, to the film sets that became the costume she never got to take off.

At every turn, the visitor is asked to stand where she stood, not to admire her from across the room. The dramaturgical premise is singular: becoming isn’t something that happened to Marilyn. It was something she chose, many times, at a cost most icons never have to pay. The exhibition makes that choice legible, room by room.

Four zones carry the journey:

Meet the Icon. The exhibition opens at scale. Walls over eight metres high become wraparound projection. Sound is calibrated so that Marilyn’s own voice feels addressed to each visitor individually. She narrates her life directly: intimate, unvarnished, honest. The audience sits inside the monologue rather than in front of it. Glamour and vulnerability held inside the same breath.

Marilyn Monroe Productions. A reimagined 1950s Hollywood sound stage. Street sets, lighting rigs, the quiet machinery of the dream factory. The room is not a photo op. It is the argument. Marilyn was not discovered. She was produced, take by take, fitting by fitting, publicity still by publicity still. Visitors pass through the production line as crew, not as audience.

Studio Wardrobe Department. Where digital dressing meets physical fabric. Costume pieces Marilyn actually wore stand in deliberate dialogue with projected dressing, sets, and props. Projection geometries are calibrated so that light falls on real weave, real weight, real seam. What results is neither set nor screen. A single composition in which the physical and the projected have equal billing.

Hollywood Screening Room. After the density of the previous zones, a deliberate contraction. An intimate cinema running restored trailers from her career. The arc, in her own films, in her own time. Seating chosen for stillness rather than spectacle. The visitor, having walked through the machinery that built her, sits alone with what it produced.

Underneath the four zones runs a sensory field designed to belong to no single room: an interactive audioguide in three languages carrying more than 120 minutes of original narration, 250 images drawn from the archives of Sam Shaw, Milton H. Greene, and Bernard of Hollywood, 116 printed panels placed with editorial precision, and an original score composed for the spaces by KLING KLANG KLONG.

Marilyn Monroe is more than a cultural icon. She’s a story about transformation, courage, and the price of being unapologetically yourself. Our goal was to build an experience that doesn’t just show her life. It lets visitors feel the weight and the light of it. Every room, every sound, every projection is built around one question: what did it take to become Marilyn?
Leigh Sachwitz, Chief Strategy Officer, The Storytelling Company

PERFORMANCE & IMPACT
Becoming Marilyn Monroe opened as the only immersive exhibition officially associated with the Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC, produced to honour the 100th anniversary of her birth. The Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights of Marilyn Monroe™ are granted by the Estate, a level of access reserved for projects the Estate considers worthy of her name.

Opening
World premiere: Lichthalle MAAG, Zurich, 27 March 2026
Running: 27 March to 28 June 2026

Industry recognition
Estate-sanctioned centenary status places the exhibition in rare company. Few biographical immersive works operate with direct estate collaboration, and fewer still are granted the use of the subject’s Rights of Publicity and Persona Rights. The combination positions Becoming Marilyn Monroe as a reference case for what the genre is capable of when archival access, editorial ambition, and experiential craft are treated as a single conversation.

Proof of format
The exhibition closes a gap the immersive industry has been circling for a decade: that biographical immersive work, if left to its defaults, becomes a louder version of the same image that made its subject famous. Becoming Marilyn Monroe points to another way. A life, treated as architecture. A myth, interrogated rather than amplified. A centenary earned rather than decorated. A world worth entering, built on the principle that visibility and understanding are not the same thing.

CREDITS
An original immersive exhibition designed by flora&faunavisions, produced and delivered by The Storytelling Company (TSC)

Directed and creatively led by Mitch Sebastian
Producer Broadway International Group
Producers / Executive Producers Marc Routh and Simone Genatt, Broadway Asia
Co-Producers Bergamot Front Row Fund · Broadway Immersive Entertainment
Project Producer Rod Kaats
Production Design, Scenic, Audiovisual, Technical The Storytelling Company, designed by flora&faunavisions
Zurich Presenter and Promoter Darko Soolfrank and MAAG Moments
Soundtrack Compositions and Immersive Audio Production KLING KLANG KLONG
Produced in Association with The Estate of Marilyn Monroe LLC

TSC team
Creative Director Design Sebastian Grebing
Creative Director Concept Ben Tritschler
Art Director Main Show Antonia Faye Böhme
Executive Producer Sixtine de Cidrac
Creative Producer Michaela Fragner
Chief Strategy Officer Leigh Sachwitz