She wears pants instead of tulle, her lipstick is a darker shade and her hair is piled up in a studied mess, but she’s obviously pretty, and her convictions are hollow: She talks a big game about being herself, then signs up for a (disappointingly rendered) makeover in the blink of an eye, courtesy of a sinister couturier Godmother (Christina Acosta Robinson) who is like The Little Mermaid ’s Ursula the Sea Witch without any danger or stakes: If our heroine stays at the ball past midnight, then…her new dress may stop fitting as well, or something. For one thing, she’s never convincingly unconventional: She just seems to shop at a different store at the mall from the others, one that caters to a prefab “alternative” image. The musical collapses at the center, because Cinderella is an attitudinal bore. Unfortunately, this is not a Queen and Stepmother story. (“Thrust your sword with pride! Don’t let it grow limp!“ sings a muscular spread of male dancers, stripped to the waist in a gold gym.) The show is most successful when it hews to campiness, especially in the juicy vocals and hamming of the story’s two smother mothers: Grace McLean as the extravagant Queen-who is bent on finding a bride for Charming’s younger brother, the gangling Sebastian (Jordan Dobson), at a Bachelor -style ball-and Carolee Carmello as Cinderella’s scheming stepmother, who wants to snag Sebastian for one of her heir-headed daughters (Sami Gayle and Morgan Higgins).īad Cinderella | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman Gabriela Tylesova’s glitzy outfits and pop-up-book sets are fun to look at, as are the attractive chorus members who flex and prance for our delectation. Bad Cinderella is a box of costume jewels: flashy but short on value. This promising conceit, though, turns out to be in vain. (When we first meet her, she is set upon by a pitchfork-wielding mob for spray-painting BEAUTY SUCKS on a statue of the city’s missing hero, Prince Charming.) The script by Emerald Fennell, retouched for Broadway by Alexis Scheer, is set in a monarchic French city-state called Belleville whose fit, brightly attired, Instagram-ready denizens cheerfully sing that “beauty is our duty” the orphaned Cinderella (Linedy Genao), reduced to household chores by her mean stepfamily, defines herself against the prevailing aesthetic regime. Ostensibly, the show presents itself as a critique of superficiality.
In fairness, this Cinderella is only half-bad, but its virtues are in all the wrong places.
As the old expression goes: If the shoe fits… That’s a minor victory for truth in marketing, at least. And now there is Bad Cinderella, a 2021 Andrew Lloyd Webber bauble that ran for a year in the West End as Cinderella but has tacked the word Bad in front of its title to make its U.S. The archetypal rags-to-riches heroine figures prominently in two Broadway fairy-tale mashups, the recent Into the Woods and the upcoming Once Upon a One More Time last month, Off Broadway’s Hip Hop Cinderella sent her to outer space. Musical theater loves a Cinderella story, and in 2023 that affection has been unusually literal.
0 kommentar(er)
