The Britney Spears jukebox musical “Once Upon a One More Time” isn’t a bio-show recounting the singer’s life. Rather, it retrofits two dozen of her songs — together with “Oops! … I Did It Again,” “Womanizer,” “Toxic,” “Gimme More” and, after all, “ … Baby One More Time” — to inform the story of a fair-haired princess who, realizing she has been performed by a good-looking rogue and managed by an omnipresent father determine, rises up and fights for her emancipation.
Hmm, possibly the (fully authorized) apple doesn’t fall removed from the tree.
But this massive, splashy present, which is kind of entertaining at times, is hampered by a shambolic jumble of sisterhood 101 messaging and defanged fantasy revisionism. Rewriting basic yarns with a pop-feminist spin has change into massive enterprise, with Disney updating its working system one property at a time, and princesses and fairy tales calcifying into widespread tropes of empowerment pep on Broadway — suppose “Frozen,” “Aladdin,” “Bad Cinderella” or, for an artistically profitable instance, “Head Over Heels.”
“Once Upon a One More Time” banks on a well-recognized determine, Cinderella (Briga Heelan), who right here is beginning to really feel vaguely antsy about her life. She and her fellow storybook heroines — Snow White (Aisha Jackson), Princess Pea (Morgan Whitley), Rapunzel (Gabrielle Beckford), Sleeping Beauty (Ashley Chiu) and Little Mermaid (Lauren Zakrin) — are bossed round by an imperious Narrator (Adam Godley, for whom this should really feel like a trip after “The Lehman Trilogy”). He is mainly a domineering stage supervisor performing on behalf of the patriarchy.
Although Cinderella is meant to be content material within the happy-ever-after, her loneliness simply is perhaps killing her. But shush, fairly girl, push these ideas out of your beautiful head: As her prince (Justin Guarini) soothingly informs her, “You’re paid to be fairly, and I’m paid to be charming.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com