Marie Curie musical at Charing Cross Theatre review [Video]

The road to musical theatre nirvana is strewn with bad ideas and good intentions. On paper, a South Korean tuner about a pioneering double Nobel Prize-winning female scientist whose legacy includes the treatment for cancer, sounds like an apotheosis of those extremes.

It’s good then to report that Marie Curie, receiving its English-language premiere after taking Asia by storm, is a surprisingly efficient example of the genre, and crucially one that seldom trivialises the epoch-making importance of Madame Curie’s work and never insults the intelligence of its audience.

Sarah Meadows’ well-judged, fleet production suffers from the inbuilt earnestness that suffuses Jongyoon Choi’s Sondheim-lite music and Emma Fraser’s translation of Seeun Choun’s original lyrics, but wisely centres itself on the human beings at the centre of this sombre, authentically important story.

There’s not much humour here (discovering radium and polonium then finding out the former’s killing innocent factory workers is hardly the stuff of thigh-slapping comedy) but neither …