So to Act Two and the ball uses the revolve that many will remember from the first production of Cats at this theatre.
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER CINDERELLA STORY FULL
They might as well be full of crystals as Cinderella cannot walk in heels and she is the only Belleville woman who can’t. The extreme procedure involves surgery as well as new clothes and hair and the shoes are agony but covered in crystals. Godmother says she’s an artist but she is scary. Her shop and beauty lab has a circle of pale mannequins who eerily come to life. The Godmother, more Mafia Godmother than Fairy Godmother (Gloria Onitiri) takes Cinderella in hand and organises a full makeover. The sisters get ready for the ball and leave Cinderella at home. These two provide much of the show’s comedy. But then they are not meant to be attractive but figures of fun.Ĭinderella and Sebastian sing of their friendship in the pretty ballad “Only You, Lonely You”. The Queen and the Stepmother discover that they have a joint past in the Pigalle, the red light district of Paris in the song “I Know You”. The other problem is that the topless knights’ choreography is all machismo and fight dance, nothing like as attractive as the Magic Mike dancers, whose dance is original. I found the Belleville residents lacking in interest, doll like girls in rose, apricot and Elastoplast pink frocks and the men, the knights so self absorbed with getting muscles at the gym, that they haven’t developed their brains.
Their mother describes one as imbecilic and the other as being only half as bright! Both are blonde, Adele with pink streaks and Marie with a green swathe and heavily into pink, frilly clothes. The two stepsisters Adele (Laura Baldwin) and Marie (Georgina Castle) are a pair of air heads whose first song is to whine “Unfair, unfair”. I rather liked her style and was pleased to see at least one audience member copying her.Ĭinderella lives with her stepmother (Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), think Cruella de Ville without the blonde hair streak meets Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, long cigarette holder and a very deep, throaty voice honed with years of cigarettes. His childhood friend is Cinderella (Carrie Hope Fletcher) a girl who defies the cult of beauty in favour of Goth, dark straggly hair, black lipstick and dark clothes with grey net skirt imitating cobwebs, black lace wrist cuffs and Doc Martens. Shy Sebastian, the lyric describing him makes prince rhyme with wince, has to marry and goes from being the least sought after man to boyfriend material. They are convinced that there is only one culprit, bad Cinderella. Belleville loses its award because of the state of the statue and the town’s witch hunt is set in motion. Prince Charming is missing in action against a dragon and his mother the Queen (Rebecca Trehearn) is distraught and has to accept that her younger son Prince Sebastian (Michael Hamway the understudy to Ivano Turco) will become king.
For 49 years Belleville has been awarded the crown of most attractive town. Set in a one town kingdom called Belleville, France, where everyone is beautiful and has perfect hair, the statue of Prince Charming is defiled by graffiti and a bra as if the prince had been associated with the Slave Trade. With all the Covid related delays to this production of Cinderella, we at least had the wonderful song “Bad Cinderella” sung by Carrie Hope Fletcher promising us a Cinderella with a difference and looking forward to the music. You may have seen Ms Fennel playing Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, who has her own Cinderella story.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show is definitely aimed at adults with plenty of wit from David Zippel’s lyrics and Emerald Fennel’s book. Princes are decidedly out of fashion with today’s feminist mothers with their experience of kissing frogs but many little girls have been seduced by Disney’s Frozen which opens as a musical in London soon. In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, Cinderella rhymes with salmonella. At the end of the story after Cinderella marries her prince, both sisters are blinded and have to live as beggars. In Aschenputtel, the Grimms’ Cinderella, one ugly sister cuts off her big toe to make the glass slipper fit and the other cuts off part of her heel. The Brothers Grimm often built on the French originals and made sure that each fairy tale had a cruel aspect. I remember a small girl being traumatised at a Young Vic fairytale play which had gone back to the gruesome Charles Perrault original story but which had since become a prettified family favourite.
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