![]() ![]() "In the title role, an appealing Linedy Genao tries to give the girl some gusto. From start to finish during this perplexing and often dull fairytale spin - and, oh, does it spin - you’re never entirely sure what you’re watching or why you’re watching it." It’s a mess with multiple personality disorder. "For a musical with the drunken confidence to slap the word “Bad” in front of a classic title, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Bad Cinderella,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, doesn’t have much in the way of ‘tude and swagger onstage. "A wacko storybook dumpster fire on Broadway" Even without the blessing of critics, and just like “Bad Cinderella,” it’s an implausible story about a real marriage of love." ![]() We can argue that “Evita” wasn’t good for the culture - and “Cats” not good for anything - but somehow, he and Broadway made a match that’s lasted like no other. "Lloyd Webber, not only British but a Lord, has been, in that sense, America’s most successful theater composer. Aside from those strident sets and costumes (by Gabriela Tylesova) and that aggressive sound (by Gareth Owen), there is a fundamental mismatch between the flippant fairy tale tone of the book, which wants the lightest possible treatment, and the exhaustingly one-note insistence of the staging." "One reason it isn’t is the unrelievedly pompous direction by Laurence Connor. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks." It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace (let alone the melodic delight) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. "That’s because “Bad Cinderella” is not the clever, high-spirited revamp you might have expected, casting contemporary fairy dust on the classic story of love and slippers. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility." Not just because the songs in “Bad Cinderella,” the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. But his 13th new musical may not be the charm." "Andrew Lloyd Webber hopes to extend an unbroken 43-year streak on Broadway. And for so often rewarding creators for rehashing old stories while vainly expecting the unexpected." ![]() For not-so-secretly wanting to be admired ourselves, and to see our vanity endlessly reflected back to us. If “every great disaster has a villain,” as the hot people of Belleville claim, maybe the villain, in this case, is us. "But as the Webber production’s requisite turntable spins and spins, it’s easy to wonder who this new fable is for and what revised moral it aims to impart. "'Bad Cinderella,' directed here by Laurence Connor (“School of Rock”), even manages to gleefully reinforce the chronic social fixations - on beauty, vanity and wealth - that it purports to deem toxic." Composed by Webber and with lyrics by David Zippel, it is a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairy tale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot." "To clear up the obvious question, “Bad Cinderella,” which opened at the Imperial Theater Thursday night, isn’t good. "Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Muddled, Sexed-Up, Broadway Spin on the Fairy Tale Is True to Its Name" ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |