Glib and snarky: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, at Gillian Lynne Theatre, reviewed

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.

The Queen, a rottweiler in a frock, wants Sebastian to marry an aristocratic dollybird. ‘Love is for peasants,’ she sneers. ‘I loathed your father and it was the happiest marriage in the kingdom.’ This remark is typical of script’s cheap, sniggering tone. The Queen is visited by Cinders’s stepmum, another rottweiler in a frock, who wants the prince to marry one of her nasty daughters. These, of course, are the Ugly Sisters from the original tale, and they’ve been reimagined as a pair of self-obsessed brats who employ Cinders as an unpaid skivvy. It’s not clear why she puts up with this humiliating job. Her best friend is the heir to the throne and yet she allows herself to be mistreated by a couple of honking bullies and their gruesome mother.