There’s a version of Once Upon a One More Time that could take that set-up and whip it into a camp meringue, but what you see onstage deflates into being ponderous and heavy-handed. Soon, Cinderella is starting to insist on changes to her storyline, pissing off the Narrator, her prince ( From Justin to Kelly’s Justin Guarini), and her evil stepmother (the eternally underutilized Jennifer Simard). Cinderella’s already a reader, and she leads her fellow princesses in a “scroll club” gathering, but the concepts of both bound pages and “the problem that has no name” are thrilling to her, so Friedan’s writing kicks off a consciousness-raising revolution in fairy-tale land. At the outset, Cinderella feels a vague dissatisfaction with her life that she can’t quite articulate, whereupon the “notorious” Original Fairy Godmother (Brooke Dillman) appears and presents her with a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. They have what amounts to Old Hollywood studio contracts, in that they have little say over their material, are constantly told they should be grateful for their happy endings, and are bossed around by a wispy mean man (Adam Godley’s Narrator) who talks down to them. In Jon Hartmere’s book, Cinderella (Briga Heelan of the late lamented Great News) and a group of other public-domain princesses work as professional reenactors of bedtime fairy tales. Instead, it’s reductive and pandering, hitting all the expected marks without any unique spark. Given that Once Upon a One More Time follows those shows in this mini-genre (not to mention their sparkly, belty, much better fairy godmother Six), you might have reason to hope that it refines and improves upon the tropes. If you run fast enough across Times Square, you might be able to see two Broadway takes on “Oops!… I Did It Again” in one evening. From those basic precepts, we’ve this past season gotten & Juliet (based on Shakespeare, featuring the songs of Max Martin) and Bad Cinderella (based on “Cinderella,” featuring the noodling of Andrew Lloyd Webber), and now, somewhere in the shaded area of their Venn diagram Once Upon a One More Time, which is based on “Cinderella” and other fairy tales and features the catalogue of Britney Spears, which includes a lot of Max Martin. There’s a newish formula to get your show to Broadway, though not necessarily to make it good: Take a well-used plot, add a vaguely feminist twist, and set it all to familiar pop music or approximations thereof.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |