![]() She pummels the script with sexual innuendos (“Fresh milk, creamy and frothy / Straight from my dairy / Squeezed by my hand”) and TikTok terms (“She’s such a Pick Me Girl”). Fellow Bellevillians list her refusal to wear mascara or blow out her hair as some of Cinderella’s most egregious crimes, both of which she immediately partakes in after deciding to attend Sebastian’s ball and seek his hand in marriage.īook writer Emerald Fennell - obviously burdened by the narrative constraints of satirizing a mid-20th-century princess story - formulaically attempts to punch the story up for its contemporary audience of Gen Z playgoers and their parents. And, truly, nothing seems all that “bad.”Īs much as townspeople lambast the girl for being “a pain, plain as day … mean too, obscene too,” Cinderella is a shockingly tame anti-heroine. All of the redundancy plays out on Tylesova’s rotating, storybook set, which parrots the inner guts of a ride at Magic Kingdom. Something vaguely important happens at midnight. Our key players - wicked Stepmother (Carolee Carmello), ditzy stepsisters (Sami Gayle and Morgan Higgins) and luminous fairy Godmother (a severely underutilized Aléna Watters, standing in for Christina Acosta Robinson at my performance) - are all on board. Sebastian is runner-up for the throne and least desirable person in town.Īside from the swap of Cindy’s love interest from royal heir to royal spare, “Bad Cinderella” follows suit with most iterations of the fable. That’s Prince Sebastian, not Charming, played gawkily by an earnest Jordan Dobson, who stumbles across the stage as Charming’s awkward younger brother. Cinderella is a stubborn wart on the face of Belleville, but the apple of the prince’s eye. While the majority of townspeople scurry across the Imperial Theatre stage in costumes seemingly inspired by Rainbow Brite, scenic and costume designer Gabriela Tylesova cloaks our rebel in a distressed swing coat with a spiky, Y2K updo (by hair and wig designer Luc Verschueren) like a punk Lizzie McGuire. Either way, “beauty is duty.” Vanity is the law, upheld by the Queen (a delightfully self-righteous Grace McLean), but Cinderella wants no part of the prettiness proclamation. ![]() Or maybe, its attractive residents live up to the town’s name. The town is named after its attractive residents. “Bad Cinderella” keeps its titular protagonist (Linedy Genao) in France, specifically Belleville. The production transferred to Broadway from London’s West End where it was simply titled “Cinderella,” but no name-change nor amount of glitz can conceal the reductive tropes in Webber’s prosaic new musical. ![]() Whether it’s Elphaba in “Wicked,” Tai Frasier in “Clueless” or now Cinderella in legendary composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest offering “Bad Cinderella,” it seems any modest maiden can evolve into belle of the ball. Nearly every inch of the human body can be tweaked, sucked and tightened, and there’s nothing quite like a makeover scene to remind us of this. ![]()
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