True love never dies — even Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries.
The reality star’s whirlwind 2011 romance with Humphries will re-enter the spotlight this month thanks to a new London musical called “The Marriage of Kim K.”
“Marriage,” which will head to London next week after a regional tour before taking up a monthlong residency at Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival in August, is a half Kardashian musical, half Mozart opera production that will feature the reality star doing what she does best — playing up her relationships for the cameras and snapping selfies.
The show is a fresh, modern take on Mozart’s 1786 classic opera “The Marriage of Figaro.” Kardashian’s 2011 marriage to basketball star Kris Humphries plays out as a parallel to the original couple featured in “The Marriage of Figaro,” as well as a third modern couple, played by the show’s composer Stephen Hyde and his real-life partner Amelia.
Kardashian and Humphries’ character’s musical numbers veer toward contemporary R&B and rap adapted from traditional Mozart tunes.
“We were looking for something to evoke Kim’s world in the same way that Mozart captures the 18th century,” writer and executive producer Leo Mercer told the Daily News. “We’ve channeled a lot of the things we reckon Kim loves too, from ‘Barbie Girl’ to Robin Thicke and, of course, a lot of Kanye (West)!”
Meanwhile, the characters from the actual “Marriage of Figaro” perform Mozart’s original opera in full period costumes.
The centuries-apart relationships find their common link thanks to Stephen and Amelia. The pair’s own arguments stem from the fact that Amelia prefers spending her time indulging in guilty pleasures like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” — and though Stephen doesn’t necessarily approve of the brain-melting reality TV, Amelia notices in quite a meta fashion that Kardashian’s relationship with Humphries is similar to the relationship featured in “The Marriage of Figaro.”
For Mercer, the idea that Amelia was consumed by the show’s glitz and glamour despite her partner’s dismissal wasn’t too much of a stretch. Mercer says that the idea for the show came to him after a friend was absoutely shocked to learn he had never heard of Kim Kardashian.
“She just couldn’t understand how I’d manage to be alive without ever hearing about her,” he said. “It’s weird how to some people, she can be the most famous person on the planet, but to others, she’s no one. So I decided to write a production about a couple: for one, she’s everything, for the other, she’s nothing. Since watching it, so many of my married friends have come out and said their relationship is exactly like that.”
Mercer admits that he and Hyde didn’t reach out to Kardashian herself for research, but instead watched many episodes of both “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “Kourtney and Kim Take New York,” combed Instagram and sorted through the endless supply of Kardashian GIFs floating around the internet.
“Part of the fun actually was trying to reconstruct what happened in those 72 days, just by guesswork, like being a detective,” Mercer said. “Beacuse that’s what we do, we hear snippets of other people’s lives on social media and reconstruct glamourized versions for ourselves! I remember guessing that Kim and Kanye had been talking on the phone during those days, and putting that in the story. Then, a few months later, it was all over the news that they had been!”
“The Marriage of Kim K”will hit London later this month for a brief stint before heading to Fringe Festival in Edinburgh.
