Woke ‘hit’ goes up in smoke

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER’S new Cinderella musical has closed. Should we be surprised? Alarm bells rang when scriptwriter Emerald Fennell promised ‘a modern feminist take on the classic fairy tale’. Uh oh.

When I went to see the show, this fem-Cinderella was played by Carrie Hope Fletcher as a goth who wore a shade of black lipstick called Trampsylvania. She

lived in a town called Belleville where the locals kept pointing out that she was ‘repulsive’ and ‘shockingly plain’. Cue song.

‘I was not a hard one to convince,’ she sang. ‘Girls like me don’t end up with a prince.’

This poor 21st-century Cinderella was popped through the boil wash of modern feminism, emerging as a spirited maverick who refused to let her life be defined or validated by a man.

Good for her! Yet it was weighed down with gender politics — a chorus line of dancing boys in leather shorts and several jokes about ‘hot buns’ — and blighted by the lack of a single hit song.

Go woke, go broke, show goes up in smoke. The end.