Cinderella — with an edge — coming to the NAC
Social justice central to Rodgers and Hammerstein musical makeover, writes Jim Burke.
It’s got all the traditional ingredients — fairy godmother, wicked stepsisters, doting prince and a pumpkin turning into a carriage — but here, Cinderella is more likely to be interested in smashing the glass ceiling than worrying over a missing glass slipper.
In this Broadway makeover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein television special (broadcast in 1957 with a 21-year-old Julie Andrews as Cinderella), the moping kitchen maid longing to be rescued by a Prince Charming has been replaced by a gutsy heroine who aims to use her fairy-granted superpowers to shake up the status quo. Playwright Douglas Carter Beane (who wrote the screenplay for the Patrick Swayze/Wesley Snipes drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar) has also foregrounded the post-Shrek snarky humour.
The lavish show, which opened on Broadway in 2013 and attracted nine Tony nominations (it won for best costumes), is on a national tour — it’s at the National Arts Centre Oct. 25-30 — put together by the company Broadway Across Canada. Touring director Gina Rattan is building on the directorial template created by Mark Brokaw.
“In the classic fairy story, the prince wants a bride and Cinderella wants to be rescued,” Rattan says. “Those are pretty undynamic character traits, especially for a full-length musical. There’s only so much you can get out of that, especially in this day and age when we’re used to seeing people’s backstories and seeing what makes them who they are.
“So in this case, Cinderella is more assertive, and she’s also more of a fully rounded person. You understand her perspective and you understand what motivates her.”
While wedding bells invariably sound a note of happily-ever-after in traditional fairy tales, this Cinderella recognizes there’s something rotten in the kingdom and urges her prince to do something about it. And just in case he starts dragging his well-heeled feet, there’s a merry band of revolutionary activists waiting in the wings.
Perhaps significantly, Beane was writing the book for the show just as Occupy Wall Street was gaining traction. Rattan agrees the movement for change may well have influenced Beane’s rewriting of the story.
“I think it did in the sense of asking: How do we create a world for Cinderella and for the prince where there’s something for them to do and a purpose for them to have?” she says. “There’s something rather wonderful about them coming together and trying to solve society’s problems as a couple.”
Other changes include downplaying the stepsisters’ ugliness, perhaps to avoid accusations of unPC body-shaming (“they’re sort of the catty mean girls now,” Rattan says) and excising the prince’s parents — significant presences in the TV broadcasts of the musical, played as they were in a 1965 version by Hollywood legends Walter Pidgeon and Ginger Rogers. (A 1997 TV remake starred Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother.)
The reason for making the prince an orphan, Rattan says, is so “he doesn’t have that guidance on how to be a ruler. That’s something Cinderella helps him find throughout the course of the show.”
For all the innovations, this is classic Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the team behind this revival has been astute enough not to meddle with the legendary pair’s brand of musical magic. As well as the songs written for the original 1957 broadcast, songs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein back catalogue have also been drafted in.
What’s striking about watching the 1957 and 1965 television specials now is how innocent those times were, when the fairy-tale formula of poor-waif-rescuedby-powerful-rich-guy could be presented with such big-hearted sincerity. What’s coming out of our
You get this really full picture of female characters who have agency, who make decisions and who are not just secondary characters to a male storyline.
televisions right now, courtesy of the U.S. election cycle, reinforces how such an outdated formula might stick in the craw like a poisoned apple. Which is why, Rattan insists, this revised version is very much a Cinderella for our times.
“It’s something that we discussed in the rehearsal process — everything that’s in the news right now and how toxic it is,” she says. “This show is very special to me for that reason. It’s giving a voice and a dynamic characterization to many different kinds of women. You get this really full picture of female characters who have agency, who make decisions and who are not just secondary characters to a male storyline.”