For reasons never properly explained, after inveighing against superficiality, Cinderella goes along with it. She must get to the ball to marry him before anyone else can.Īt which point, after a mix of everything from comic one-liner put-downs to adult-pleasing double-entendres, there’s one of the show’s many tonal lurches when Cinderella finds herself in a cross between a bridal shop and an icy operating theater, presided over by a stalking, Grace Jones-like Godmother (Gloria Onitri, in perilous heels and a voice of doom) who promises her perfect beauty via temporary plastic surgery. And for most of the otherwise predictable first act, everything sticks fairly closely to the standard one-girl-against-the-world plot, peppered by Fennell with faintly dated nods to what used to be called “girl power.” The difference is that Cinderella realizes that she’s is in love with Sebastian.
Unhappy about this, Sebastian confides in his best friend - who is, natch, Cinderella. To fill the coffers, she whips up a royal wedding complete with a ball, at which a wife will be chosen for her hapless and, in her eyes, hopeless second son, Prince Sebastian (young Ivano Turco in his West End debut.) In part, that’s because the statue is of her dead son Prince Charming. Not for nothing is the arch, opening scene-setter entitled “Buns’n’Roses.”īut things swiftly go awry when it’s revealed that Cinderella has defaced the new statue, which causes Belleville to lose its crown as “Most Attractive Town.” The waspish Queen – played by Rebecca Trehearn, whose deliciously withering grandeur would give Marie Antoinette pause - is not, to put it mildly, pleased. Our heroine, the black-lipsticked and goth-laced “Bad Cinderella” (as she’s called in the punchy, calling-card number that leads the overture and is reprised on umpteen occasions) lives in Belleville, which, according to lyricist David Zippel, is “a town so picturesque/ every other seems grotesque.” The rest of the population consists of under-dressed men who are buff and manly, and over-dressed women who are blonde and perfect. But the ride he’s written for her with Oscar-winning screenwriter Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) is seriously bumpy. With actor/singer and internet sensation Carrie Hope Fletcher wholly energizing the new-wine-in-old-bottles story of a self-assured heroine defiantly refusing to fit in with the fairytale world that despises her, he’s halfway there. Where do you go after you’ve seen “Wicked”? That worldwide smash has built a vast young audience hungry for stories propelled by power ballads of female empowerment, and it’s clearly that crowd that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-delayed new musical version of “ Cinderella” is eager to please.
0 kommentar(er)
