SYNOPSIS

The musical opens in Marie Curie’s final days. Sitting at her research desk, she is visited by her daughter Irène, who takes her temperature. When told that her temperature has dropped from the day before, Marie calmly replies that it is simply the natural process of dying. She scolds Irène for neglecting her research in order to care for her, and tells her to work hard so that she may one day receive the Nobel Prize. She then expresses her wish to be buried with a small pouch, which makes Irène curious.

The scene shifts to a train, where a small incident introduces Marie to a young Polish woman, Anne Kowalski (who insists on this name instead of Kowalska). Marie shows her the Periodic Table, explaining that it is a map of the smallest unit of matter, promising that one day her name will be on it. Anne, touched, gives Marie a small pouch filled with Polish soil.

At the Sorbonne, male students dismiss Marie for her nationality and gender. Pierre Curie appears, asking a professor for a research assistant. When Marie volunteers, Pierre replies that he is celibate — but she was only asking if she can get tungsten. Pierre asks Marie why she does science; Marie answers that it is because of curiosity.

Scenes change quickly. Marie and Pierre discuss how electricity and magnetism can be unified. Pierre says it can be unified in a closed system, and Marie counters that it can be unified in a “general system.” Anne brings Polish cake to celebrate Marie’s birthday. Anne says her situation is not good because she was expelled from a glass factory for speaking out about workers’ rights. Marie shows Anne a spectrum with extraordinary lines that reveal radiation far more intense than uranium in pitchblende. Anne, not knowing what it means, asks if Marie can put her name on the map — the Periodic Table.

Ruben Dupont, a wealthy investor, comes to the Sorbonne to find good research to support. Needing funds, Marie turns to Ruben and promises that he will witness “a new light.” She convinces him to support her research. In the lab, Marie crushes and melts ore, using a quadrant electrometer to identify a new element. After long struggle she announces polonium, named after her homeland, and later radium, “the new light.” Marie declares that she will not apply for a patent, as these elements are for everybody to use.

Meanwhile, Anne takes a job at Ruben Dupont’s clock factory thanks to Marie’s introduction, painting luminous dials with radium paint. She and her Polish colleagues lick the tips of their brushes to keep a fine point. They sing of big dreams, but one of them was already ill and hospitalized.

Marie applies to the French Academy of Sciences but receives a refusal letter due to her gender and nationality.

Pierre and Marie are awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. After the prize, they continue their work as they always did, without seeking fame or money.

When Marie saw a young girl with retinoblastoma, she considered it possible to treat the cancer with radium and persuaded Ruben Dupont to fund the therapy. She tells him it is far bigger than radium lipstick, condoms, or cigarettes. Seeing a future in medicine, he agrees to support her research. At his hospital, Marie attempts the treatment using radium radiation.

But signs of danger appear. Pierre notices radium causes skin lesions. To test it, Marie paints a strip of cloth with radium and wraps it around her forearm. Pierre does the same on his leg.

At the factory, more workers fall ill and die. Autopsy reports claim syphilis. Anne refuses to believe it and confronts Ruben. He warns her not to taint Marie’s name by calling radium poisonous. Marie overhears their conversation, realizes the workers may indeed be dying from radium poisoning, and — visibly shaken — asks Ruben to stop both the factory and the clinical trials. He agrees, but insists she remain at the hospital to continue treating the retinoblastoma girl, whose vision seems to improve. Secretly, however, he orders the factory to run 24/7.

Pierre, worried, searches for a doctor who disappeared after raising doubts about Ruben’s hospital. The doctor is frightened at the sight of Pierre and asks if anyone followed him, but at Pierre’s persuasion promises to return to Paris and tell the truth. While Marie is in her laboratory, she hears that Pierre has died in a carriage accident. She is paralyzed by grief, until Pierre’s vision appears to comfort her. Marie requests an autopsy.

The autopsy report confirms Pierre died of hemorrhage from a fractured skull, but Marie adds that his leg had been too weak to dodge the carriage, saying his bone density had decreased from radiation poisoning.

Anne, consumed with guilt for the factory deaths, climbs a tall building to end her life. Marie follows her. Anne blames Marie for betraying the innocent workers. Marie protests that she “did not know,” but admits that she had been afraid the truth might stop her research. Anne accepts Marie’s apology, and as they embrace, Anne tells Marie that she is the shining star who received two Nobel Prizes and left her elements on the map, the Periodic Table.

The story returns to Marie’s final days. She explains the pouch of Polish soil, and admits to Irène that she was not a good mother, often neglecting her in pursuit of science. She urges her daughter not to live as she did. Irène reassures her: she lived a great life.


REVIEW

Maria Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman awarded a Nobel Prize and the first female faculty member at the Sorbonne. This musical tells her life story with theatrical inventions — some imaginative, some misleading.

One thing to mind when portraying a real person in a musical: creators may take liberties, but they must also face criticism. Mozart has often been cast as a protagonist in films and musicals, his life exaggerated or distorted. Marie Curie’s story receives the same treatment here.

At the end of the 19th century, Edison, Tesla, Bell, and Curie often appear as cameo figures in popular culture, their science reshuffled freely for dramatic convenience. A brief television appearance, I do not mind. But Marie Curie is a musical with Curie herself as its titular character, and here accuracy matters. The show treats her respectfully, presenting her as moral and scientifically minded. Yet in binding her too closely to invented subplots and invented guilt, it distorts both her context and her voice.

🎵 Music and Performances

The score was surprisingly good and memorable. Written for a mid-sized theater with a cast of about ten, the staging was effective, and the orchestra — largely piano and strings — carried light, catchy motifs that stayed in my ear. The composer knows how to expand duets and trios into ensemble numbers, giving a small cast unexpected breadth.

Ock Joo-hyun, as Marie, was the show’s powerhouse. She can both sing and act — what a performance. Her only flaw was the occasional awkward vowel shading in diphthongs, but this hardly detracted from her dramatic command. Cha Yun-hae, as Pierre, was a stable singer, tall and poised. Kang Hye-in, as Anne Kowalski — the Polish girl Marie befriends on the train to Paris and later a lifelong friend working at the radium-dial factory — sang with clear high notes that shone especially in duets with Marie. My favorite voice of the night belonged to Kang Tai-eul as Ruben Dupont: resonant, warm, carrying easily to the farthest corner of the auditorium. Even the factory workers, each given solo lines and role names, sang with strength. Not one faltered — a rare thing in an ensemble.

🎭 Staging

The staging cleverly used the limitations of a mid-sized venue. Glow effects for radium, simple factory scenes, and the intimacy of Marie’s domestic life all translated well. The factory-worker sequences, with their solo spots, gave every performer presence. With only a small orchestra, the production nonetheless made its world feel surprisingly expansive.

🔬 The Science That Distracted Me

And yet — the science.

The very first misstep came early: Pierre and Marie discovering that “electricity and magnetism are exchangeable.” This was not theirs to discover; it was Ørsted, Faraday, and finally Maxwell who unified electromagnetism in the 19th century, decades before the Curies. To hand them that crown was like giving Mozart’s symphonies to Beethoven. As soon as I heard it, I could not focus.

Pierre tells Marie “electromagnetism works only in closed systems,” and Marie replies that “it works in general systems.” There is no such thing as a “general system” in physics; physicists speak of open, closed, and isolated systems. Later, Marie scribbles a half-finished partial differential equation on a blackboard — with only one variable, where an ordinary derivative would have sufficed. To the audience, it signals brilliance; to a scientist, it is parody. It recalled Good Will Hunting, with its stylized chalkboard genius, except Will was at least solving in his own field. Numb3rs consulted mathematicians for authenticity. This show did not.

The sodium chloride metaphor was another stumble. Marie and Pierre say that their bond is as strong as NaCl. But NaCl bonds dissolve instantly in water. Elphaba’s bucket could wash away their love as easily as the Wicked Witch. A physicist on the writing team could have saved them from this irony.

At one point the script even has Curie comparing a “treatment group” with a “control group,” claiming efficacy at double the dose. But Curie never designed or conducted animal experiments, and in experimental science a control group is not given a higher dose but rather withheld treatment, or else benchmarked against an established therapy. This misuse of terminology makes her sound less like a turn-of-the-century physicist-chemist than a 20th-century biotech scientist.

Even Pierre’s death is reframed. The script suggests that transdermal exposure to radium had weakened his bones, leaving him too fragile to step aside when the carriage came. In truth, radiation from radium—composed mainly of alpha particles—cannot penetrate the skin, though prolonged contact once caused reports of burns and ulcerations. The musical also simplifies Marie’s answer to Pierre’s question—why she pursues science—to a single word: curiosity. Yet for many scientists, it is not curiosity alone. It is inevitability, delight, and beauty; a pull as natural as breathing.

🎭 Inventions and Melodrama

The show invents a financier, Ruben Dupont, who funds Marie’s radium research and runs a radium clock factory. Historically, radium was so rare in 1900 that Marie spent years isolating fractions of a gram. Factories churning out consumer products only appeared in the U.S. in the 1910s and 1920s, leading to the tragedy of the Radium Girls. The musical compresses all this into Paris c. 1900 and makes Marie responsible for persuading Ruben into clinical trials.

This distortion leads to her strangest moment: confessing to Anne that she hesitated to stop Ruben because she feared for her research. To the general audience, this plays as tragic moral hesitation. But to any scientist it is unthinkable. Scientific misconduct is a one-strike-out death sentence. It is like Milli Vanilli’s lip-sync that ended their career in music. The true tragedy of Curie’s life was not concealment but ignorance. She did not hide dangers; she did not run factories or clinical trials; she did not do animal experiments or autopsies. A physicist is not an almighty scientist. It is like asking an opera singer to do ballet. She was a physicist-chemist, not a doctor. To make her into a Faustian figure is unfair.

Her final confession to Irène — that she should not have given away rights to radium, that she is to blame — is a theater device, not history. Her actual ethic was the opposite: to keep radium unpatented, free for science. And if Curie, or any real scientist, were to confess wrongdoing, it would not be in sweeping melodrama. A scientist breaks down what happened. If one erred, one specifies the act and faces the consequences.

🌱 What Rang True

There were moments, however, that felt authentic. In the opening scene, when Irène measures her mother’s temperature and Marie remarks that it is dropping, she accepts her dying process almost clinically. That, I believe. Many scientists would describe their decline in the same observational tone. That line resonated far more than the later bursts of vague guilt.

And her answer to Pierre’s question — “Why do you do science?” — struck me as thin. She says, “Out of curiosity.” For stage, that works. But in real life, no scientist asks that question. It is as absurd as asking Pavarotti why he sings. It is not curiosity; it is inevitability. It is fun, beauty, something in the bones.

Equally clumsy was Marie’s opening scolding of Irène: if she worked harder in the lab, she too might win a Nobel Prize. That line is as absurd as telling a young singer he will be the next Pavarotti if he only practices. Nobels, like world-class artistry, are not rewards for diligence but for rare brilliance that changes the world.

✨ Conclusion

Marie Curie the musical sings with passion, has a memorable score, and features outstanding performances — Ock Joo-hyun’s especially. The staging makes much of little, and the ensemble is strong. But when the script puts false guilt into Curie’s mouth, it crosses a line.

Except for the Radium Girls historical and geographic compression, what I found saddest was that almost all of the script and staging errors could have been easily corrected before opening night if the team had consulted a physicist or a physical chemist — someone who knows the correct terminology and the code of scientific conduct. A single expert voice could have preserved the integrity of the story without diminishing its drama.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s true story is already luminous: a woman who crushed tons of ore with her own hands, who carried glowing vials in her pocket unaware of the danger, who built instruments with Pierre to measure what no one else could see. She refused to patent radium, choosing instead to give it freely to the world. That was her ethic — scientific honesty, selflessness, and devotion to knowledge. That story alone is powerful enough. To honor her, the musical must trust truth as much as melody.