A FORTHCOMING Broadway musical about the life of John Lennon has rekindled tensions between Yoko Ono, the rock idol’s widow, and May Pang, his last known mistress.

The script for Lennon, which officially opens at the Broadhurst theatre in New York next month, has been approved by Ono. It uses several actors to portray Lennon. A burly black actor plays Sir Paul McCartney.

Ono, 72, who controls the rights to songs used in the production, hopes that the show will be the “culmination” of her fight to protect the legacy of her husband, who was shot dead by a deranged fan outside their New York home in 1980.

Others call it an insult. Pang, 54, a Chinese-American jeweller who had a relationship with Lennon in the 1970s, saw a preview of the show last week and claimed that she and the other three Beatles had been almost erased from the musical to make more room for Ono.

Pang, who was employed as Ono’s personal assistant in 1970, said she became Lennon’s lover after the older woman asked her to “look after” him when their marriage ran into difficulties in 1973.

She accompanied the singer when he went to Los Angeles for 18 months, during which time he worked on new records and went on bar crawls with his best friend, the late musician Harry Nilsson. Ono stayed behind in New York.

“After he first kissed me in an elevator I became part of John’s story, one of the very few women along with Yoko, his first wife Cynthia and his Aunt Mimi that he stayed close to over the years,” Pang said.

“We were talking about seeing each other again shortly before his death, but I have been airbrushed out of his life.”

Pang, who tried to ease relations between Lennon and McCartney after the Beatles split up, went on to marry Tony Visconti, the British record producer who worked with McCartney and Wings.

She is now divorced and designs jewellery, but is also planning a book of photographs documenting her years with Lennon. “Yoko gets to tell her version of history, which has changed over the years, so I want to tell mine,” she said.

Although critics will not be invited to see the musical before its official opening on August 4, some Beatles fans have attended previews and expressed their views on some of the 30,000-plus websites devoted to the group. Many are as acerbic as Pang’s.

“This is a musical Battlefield Earth,” said one, referring to a John Travolta flop. Another added: “There is too much Yoko telling John, ‘I told you so’. It makes you think Yoko really did break up the Beatles.”

Paul Saunders, who runs Revolution No 9, a radio station based in Ohio that plays only Beatles-related songs, said: “The old John and Macca rivalries are back over this musical, with strong opinions on both sides. True John fans (and maybe this musical) play down the Beatles years but, without those years, how would we know who John was?” The play’s producers, including Allan McKeown who produced the controversial musical Jerry Springer — The Opera, are enraged by the attacks.

“We are being monstered by Paul McCartney fans who have never liked Yoko,” claimed one production executive last week.

“It’s terribly unfair as this is a work in progress, with songs being rearranged and scenes being rewritten up to the opening night if necessary. Then critics can say what they like. All of us, including Yoko, want to get it right, to honour John Lennon — not to bury him.”

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