ALW's Cinderella - Gillian Lynne / U.K. Tour (rumour)

{Spoiler - click to view}
So, firstly, all I could think was – are they trying to recreate Lionel Bart’s Twang? Because it has that same vibe – part Broadway musical, part English pantomime. All those hard to assimilate things we saw in the last few months - the mixed visual aesthetics, the ‘hot buns’ man, the music that veered wildly from 2021 pop to 80s power ballads to Richard Rodgers meets operetta romanticism… I’d been wondering how they would cohere in to a whole. The answer is they don’t. All the disparate ingredients jostle with each other and never gel.



Tonally, this show is half Monty Python/Blackadder-esque comic quasi-historical romp and half sincere operetta emotionalism and the two rub up against each other really badly, undercutting each other so neither has a chance to shine. It’s a bit like the Sydmonton version of Phantom.



The score is equally at odds. As well as the operetta and the contemporary pop, we get healthy doses of harpsicord-led quasi-classical, 1970s rock (with some properly Jethro Tull-esque flute playing), a splash of accordion-led faux-French chanson, some 1980s elctro-goth and a totally left-field eleven o’clock number in a Latin-America style (a kind of lesser Buenos Aires dance number). I know Joseph has a lot of disparate elements too but they are used knowingly and specifically, and are tied together by a consistent tone of the narration material all around them. Here they just jostle for space, not even being character-specific.



There are some really good tunes (a couple that echo brief moments from other ALW shows but, as far as I can tell, no wholesale re-using of any past melodies) but the score has absolutely no aural identity. It veers all over the place. In this, at least, it is consistent with the tone of what’s on stage!

The result of all this is that I couldn’t surrender to the piece and be swept away. I didn’t care about the characters very much, or rather I didn’t believe in them enough. I didn’t really know where or when we were, or what the show wanted me to feel.



There are also random plot elements that just hang there. There is a song about the past history of the Queen and the Step-Mother, but the lyrics weren’t very audible and whatever it was referring to, it appeared to have no bearing on the plot. There’s an interesting twist ¾ of the way through where Cinderella and one of the step-sisters nearly join forces and share a moment, but that is never exploited properly. Prince Charming ‘comes back from the dead’ and no one really bats an eyelid and it’s never properly explained. It’s suggested that he did a disappearing act because he was gay and didn’t want to marry a woman he didn’t love, but you pretty much have to extrapolate that yourself in the final ten minutes. And there are real moments that make no proper sense. How can a random woman just walk in and have tea with the queen? Why does a town have a royal family all of its own anyway?! And why does Cinderella go for this space-age makeover, where the show suddenly morphs into Richard O’Briens’s Shock Treatment, only for the extent of it to be a new dress and a wig?!?



It started to come together for me in the ball scene, where the conflict onstage was musicalized properly for the first time. I actually really loved this seat and was temporarily gripped. The music, costumes and choreography were glorious. Up till then, the structure had felt very old-fashioned. There was a lot of music and singing, but it was still very clunky in its transition from dialogue to song, and many of the songs felt undramatic. It honestly felt like it had more in common with musicals of a hundred years ago, and often felt like the kind of thing ALW had reacted against when composing JCS. Oh, and the Vanquishing of the Sea Witch (or whatever it’s called) song has bitten the dust. I was looking forward to that and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how a song with that title would fit with the plot.



I won’t comment on individual performances (most of which I liked but a couple of which I felt weren’t quite strong enough). It’s very early days and finding its feet, which is fair enough. The design was lovely in parts, especially the ball, but also never enveloped me, and sometimes felt cheap. The lighting was great. The lyrics were great, too. Really witty in places and no obvious forced stresses or uncomfortable clichés. Some of the best for an ALW show in a long, long time.



My biggest bugbear was the orchestrations, and this doesn’t bode well for Phantom’s return. There were 9 live musicians, and an ominous credit for ‘original keyboard parts programmed by…’. All the drum and percussion parts were pre-programmed, which made everything feel mechanised. There were horrible synthesised trumpet parts that sounded like an 80s computer game. The string sounds (enhanced by 5 live string players) fared better. But it never felt live. It felt pre-recorded, cold and lifeless. You never felt that wonderful feeling of an orchestra launching into action and playing for us. It was most egregious in the Entr’acte. Why ALW was happy with the way this sounded I have no idea. Some shows - Hair, say, or even School of Rock – can work fine with a small band in the pit. But this show is trying to be big and lush and the reliance on pre-played synth parts sucks all the life out of it. I’m sure the recording, with a full orchestra, will sound fine but in the theatre it was pretty woeful.



I have no idea what others will make of this. A lot of the audience found it funnier than I did. But I never felt like I was in the hands of master storytellers who were confidently leading me on a journey. All ALW’s most successful shows start with a bang and go off like a juggernaut. You just hang on for the exhilarating ride. Not here, sadly. I really really wanted this to be good because it’s been diminishing returns from ALW for some time now, and he was a childhood hero of mine. But Cinderella, despite excellent individual parts, doesn’t know what it wants to be and it never comes together into a composite whole. I honestly can’t predict if this just wasn’t for me, and it’ll still be a hit show, or if it really is just a bit of a mess.