Cinderella

On exiting a recent performance of the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Cinderella, a willowy girl whom I took to be eight or nine remarked brightly to her willowy mom, “It was better than I expected it to be.” So there you have it: the Young Girl Report, which has become crucial to many musicals nowadays. First and foremost among them is Wicked, which crystalized the box office power that pre-teens and their indulgent parents currently have and which may have spurred the production of Little Women: The Musical, not to mention the possible appearance of Princesses on the Great White Way later this season.

The guiding rationale for this trend appears to be that the role models exhibited in these shows — girls who eventually learn to take the initiative even though they’ve been socialized to be docile — hold tremendous appeal for young female theatergoers. But whereas the patron quoted above may be representative of all the little girls seeing Cinderella, I had a worse time at the show than I expected.

A good deal of my reaction centered around the fact that the show is now being billed as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Often, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization rightly perpetuates the importance of its namesakes’ accomplishments by stressing the shows’ creators in their titles — but, much to my dismay, this Cinderella is no longer a strictly Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II enterprise. It has been “adapted for the stage” by Tom Briggs, working from Robert L. Freedman’s teleplay for the 1997 TV version. (The script for the original 1957 television musical was by Hammerstein). Just what Briggs’ instructions were or whether his choices were strictly his own, we may never know; but it seems clear that this property has been revived because it will presumably speak to fans of Wicked and other entertainments that portray girls as “proactive.”

Here’s a Cinderella that employs slangy expressions like “the same old same old,” and one in which the title character (Angela Gaylor) takes some of the action into her own hands in wishing oh-so-mightily that she might attend the prince’s ball. Her Fairy Godmother (Suzzanne Douglas) still has to transform the pumpkin and the mice into a carriage and horses but only does so once she has decided that Cinderella has shown some spunk. (The production’s best special effects occur here.) The mice, pretty much lifted from Disney’s animated film of Cinderella, are manipulated by actors, a device popularized in Disney’s stage treatment of The Lion King.

As a result, this Cinderella — directed conscientiously by Gabriel Barre and choreographed by Jennifer Paulson Lee — is a so-so hodgepodge rather than a magical hocus-pocus. Even the score is a hodgepodge, now that Rodgers’ No Strings ballad “The Sweetest Sounds” has been interpolated along with “Boys and Girls Like You and Me,” an R&H song that was originally written for but not used in Oklahoma!.

The hodgepodgery extends to the sets by Jim Youmans (who has appropriated the Wonderful World of Disney logo in the form of a looming castle in the background) and the costumes by Pamela Scofield, which start Persian but end up Mittel- European. And why do all the aspiring young women at the ball save Cinderella and her stepsisters, Joy (Jennifer Cody) and Grace (Janelle Anne Robinson), wear the same gown? Was this done to make some point about conformity? If so, it’s heavy-handed.

At one point in the action, the Fairy Godmother suggests to Cinderella that one’s goal in life should not be to fit in but to stand out. Douglas and Gaylor both do so, contributing liveliness and glamour to the proceedings. Surrounding them adequately are Paolo Montalban as the Prince, Joy Franz as Queen Constantine, and Larry Keith as King Maximillian. Nora Mae Lyng is more raucous than funny as the tyrannical, self-absorbed stepmother, and the same can be said for Cody and Robinson, bellowing as the stepsisters.

As timing would have it, this Cinderella arrives just as a special DVD edition of Disney’s animated Cinderella is being released. Those who are eeny-meeny-miny-moing over which version to plunk down cash for should be assured that they’ll be better off with the video, since the Paper Mill production is likely to cause them to cry “bibbity-bobbity-boo-hoo.”