The 90-minute musical is plagued with a generic book by Jason Slavick that fails to capture the enduring power of Grimm's classic tales, and a lackluster score by Cassandra Marsh that trudges up cookie cutter melodies of the most maudlin of Broadway shows and soft rock relics. Slavick's thin lyrics don't help in advancing the plot -- a princess who searches the globe for her prince -- and mostly feel like filler.

In the playbill, he writes of the show being a "punk cabaret" in the vein of Amanda Palmer. This is puzzling as the music and over-the-top dramatization couldn't be farther from punk ethos, but I couldn't help thinking of Palmer's superbly imaginative Evelyn, Evelyn that played off-Broadway a few seasons ago. Slavick and Marsh's show also features conjoined twins but the similarities end there. While Palmer's twins examine the nature of their identity, Slavick and Marsh's merely scream at each other in a shrill voice.

This lack of nuance seeps through the entire show but comes to a head in the penultimate number, "BFB," when the cast leads a reluctant audience to sing along to a song that features little more than the word "bitch." The creators seem to have taken "punk" to simply mean brash, and this is a disservice not only to the audience but to the talented cast trapped in this dreadful show.

-- Chris Kompanek