It’s a rum beast the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Cinderella is set in Belleville, a European city of 18th-century vintage, whose inhabitants are fixated with the body beautiful. Cinderella, a pasty Goth, rejects this ethos and vandalises a statue that commemorates a handsome prince who recently died in battle. Cinders is punished by being chased into a forest and tied to a tree but she’s rescued by her best friend, Prince Sebastian, who will inherit the throne as soon as he marries. Sebastian and Cinders are pals whose friendship is destined to blossom into romance. They can’t see this. We can. And that’s the story.
Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell has created a heap of trashy, unsympathetic characters. The males are either wimpy eunuchs or strapping gay beefcakes. The women, apart from Cinders, are callow, bitchy pests. Prince Sebastian, a virgin apparently, gets romantic advice from a trio of half-naked swordsmen who tell him to attract women by striding around with his pelvis thrust forwards.
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