Across the pond, Europe has been buzzing about the latest performance to debut at London’s Royal Opera House – the Anna Nicole Smith opera. The production opened a couple weeks ago and has made great fodder for tabloid reporters and drama-mongering bloggers because – as we all know in the world of pop culture – there’s a lot to say about the rags-to-riches story of the litigious Playmate whose rise to fame and troubled drug addiction has made for quite the on-stage show. And while the over the top script profiling Smith offers tremendous entertainment value, it highlights several of the deceased celebrity’s troubles that repeatedly make their way into the media even years after her untimely death.

Smith’s life was a story of instability starting with her teenage years when she married and eventually divorced a fellow fast food coworker. The on-stage display of her erratic behavior is an appropriate characterization of the former reality star’s tumultuous life. Ultimately, we see in the opera how her struggles culminated with an overdose on prescription drugs that led to her death in a Florida hotel room four years ago.

Although spot on in much of the Playboy model’s rise and the fall, the directors get sidetracked after the intermission in an attempt to make Smith out to be a tragic figure. The latter half of the production plays to the audience’s empathy by framing Smith as a victim. While misfortune makes good theater, these scenes miss the mark in their depiction of some of the final phases of her life.

One of the mischaracterizations in the second act is about her final marriage to Texas businessman J. Howard Marshall II. Marshall was 63 years Smith’s elder when they wed, and he passed away less than two years after the ceremony. In a New York Times review of the opera, one reporter alludes to a glaring error. To set the course for her downward spiral, the opera leads the audience to think that Marshall didn’t have a will, and still, Smith was left with nothing. More than a decade of legal activity between Smith and his family over the estate, however, has shown that Marshall in fact had a will, and was quite clear in his intentions. Underscoring that fact, over more than a decade Marshall drafted and updated a dozen wills and living trusts. At no point were the beneficiaries different than those included in the final will and living trust, which contained all of his property; technical aspects were merely altered. In other words, leaving Smith out of his inheritance was something he did by design.

While the opera doesn’t get into Smith’s ill-advised attempts to get her hands on his estate, the marriage’s money-driven motivations were no secret. In the years after Marshall’s death, the courts repeatedly denied Smith’s claims to Marshall’s fortune, but she pressed on and on with her demands that it was rightfully hers until the day she died.

The claims rang hollow in the court of law, but instead of letting the case pass with Smith, her ex-lovers, photojournalist Larry Birkhead and attorney Howard K. Stern, made it their mission to drag it on. During the last few weeks, the opera has given the pair another excuse to bark about how the courts should award Smith millions of dollars and how upset they are about how the opera portrays her – even threatening legal action.

Far too many reckless actions carried on Smith’s saga for far too long. As the opera’s run comes to an end in London, some reviews have reflected that it offered a new perspective on Smith’s life. While the stage lights and arias add a theatrical tone to the story, the opera showcases the troubling realities and the same unending drama surrounding Smith that many of us in Hollywood have come to know all too well.