Broadway’s curtain closes on Lloyd Webber
Composer has no show on the Great White Way for first time in four decades as Bad Cinderella run ends
‘I owe everything to my love of Broadway and its glorious legacy of musicals’
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER’S 43-year run on Broadway is coming to an end after it was announced that his Bad Cinderella show will close after just four months.
The production suffered bad reviews and reports of lacklustre ticket sales.
Its closure was announced on social media with the message: “All good things must come to an end.”
The final show will take place on June 4, marking the first time since the opening of Evita in 1979 that Lord Lloyd-webber has not had a production running on Broadway.
Phantom of the Opera closed there in April after 35 years and almost 14,000 performances. It held the record as the longest-running show in Broadway history.
Bad Cinderella is a feminist retelling of the classic fairytale, with music by Lord Lloyd-webber and a story by Emerald Fennell.
It is set in the town of Belleville, where all the residents are surgically enhanced beauties, but Cinderella insists on wearing grungy clothes and make-up.
The show originally opened in the West End in summer 2021, where it was titled simply Cinderella. It closed the following June and transferred to Broadway this March.
British critics were relatively kind, but reviews in the US were harsh. The New York Times said it was “surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down”, while Variety called it “a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairytale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot”.
Fennell, whose credits include a series of the BBC comedy-drama Killing Eve, came up with the idea of re-imagining Cinderella for a modern audience.
Lord Lloyd-webber said: “She had this idea to do a kind of alternative Cinderella and I like the idea, and thought it would be fun to do. I just let my hair down a bit – I haven’t got very much of it left, but what I had, I let down.”
Launching Bad Cinderella, Lord Lloyd-webber joked that he would not leave Broadway “until I’m thrown out”.
He recently spoke of his sadness that Phantom of the Opera was closing.
Writing in The New York Times, Lord Lloyd-webber said: “I owe everything to my love of Broadway and its glorious legacy of musicals. So everything I wrote comes from my childhood dream that I’d make it to the Great White Way.
“The 35-year Broadway run of Phantom has come to an end. It’s a personal loss to see the close of this wonderful creation, the last Hal Prince production on Broadway, with its almost 30-piece orchestra and one of the grandest designs that have ever been seen in the theatre.
“The irony is that this past season was its best ever. Perhaps it will rise again.”
Phantom cost almost $1million dollars (£872,000) per week to stage. Lord Lloyd-webber added: “I truly don’t know the answer to the ever-daunting challenges of producing Broadway musicals. “But I do know that all of us who believe in Broadway must knock our heads together if we care about the kind of future it will have.” Phantom continues to play in the West End.