![]() Belleville is a barbed, bitchy place with thrusting bare-chested “hunks” bragging about their sexual conquests. So is another fairytale, Frozen, but I wonder if part of the problem with Cinderella is how, unlike that Disney juggernaut, it isn’t targeted squarely at a young audience. Other mega musicals, including Lloyd Webber’s own masked avenger, in The Phantom of the Opera, and hits such as Hamilton, are also showing plenty of available seats this week. In a spin … Cinderella’s waltz at the Gillian Lynne theatre. There are certainly issues of confidence about returning to theatres when the majority of an audience is unmasked I didn’t see very many masks at Cinderella. Ticket prices aren’t the key issue: there are two ticket bands under £20 with lots of those seats still left. How come? Its stop-start run won’t have helped build an audience and, while many saw the composer as theatrical Marmite already, his declarations last year about risking arrest to open the show at full capacity won’t have endeared him to many. But the booking system shows lots of seats are still empty for the remaining shows. The show earned five- and four-star reviews in August and the matinee I saw – alongside several others who had already seen the show once – ended with a standing ovation in the packed stalls. Throw in Rebecca Trehearn’s Queen, with an incestuous lust for her strapping son Prince Charming, and you think how unfortunate it was that this most panto of musicals was closed for so much of the festive period through concerns about the Omicron variant. They get some of Fennell’s prickliest lines and, in the helter-skelter song Unfair, relish some of David Zippel’s snappiest lyrics too. ![]() Victoria Hamilton-Barritt – inexplicably the only cast or creative from the show to earn an Olivier nomination – is still a haughty hoot as the Stepmother, while Georgina Castle and Laura Baldwin are a double whammy of wicked vanity as her daughters. Gloria Onitiri is in such blazing voice as the Godmother that you long for her to have a bigger part. Turco’s solo, Only You, Lonely You, is delivered tenderly and the jesting duets he and Fletcher share are a delight. In the lead role, Carrie Hope Fletcher is a phenomenon (I’d forgotten she has quite so many solos) and Ivano Turco, who only graduated in the summer of 2020, is a fantastic Prince Sebastian, navigating his feelings for his childhood mucker Cinderella as well as his unease with royal duties. I wondered if it would have the same effect and, if anything, I enjoyed it even more. I was at the Gillian Lynne theatre again on Saturday afternoon to see the show for a second time after it left me giddy on opening night in August. Bear in mind that this was a bank holiday weekend: informing a huge number of workers, simultaneously, of such upsetting news requires great consideration and careful timing – why choose Sunday before a public holiday? The fact that some of the leads were already leaving the show soon does not make the situation any easier for the company.Īnd what a company they are. But for several of the show’s newest recruits, tweets and news stories about the closure reached them before their official notice did. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the GuardianĪ spokesperson for Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group said that “everyone involved in Cinderella was contacted by call, email or in person (some through agents) before the news went live in the evening” and that “every effort was made to ensure people were notified before it went live”. Cinderella had been booking until February next year and the announcement on Sunday night of its closure next month came as a surprise to many of the cast and crew, including several actors who had been about to join the company and who expressed their shock on social media.īare-chested hunks of Belleville … Rebecca Trehearn (the Queen) with Sam Robinson (Dorian), Vinny Coyle (Arthur) and Giovanni Spano (Gawain). “Should be a luc-ra-tive att-ract-tion” she predicts in a contented staccato.īut after a troubled run that included umpteen opening night postponements and a shutdown of several weeks amid the Omicron crisis, Lloyd Webber’s latest attraction is to close early, despite London tourism beginning to bounce back from its 2020-21 lows and the West End’s footfall slowly returning towards pre-pandemic levels. “We’re so dependent on the tourist trade to fill our cupboards and our coffers,” observe the chorus of the town, before the Queen unveils a grand statue. Buns N Roses, the cheeky opening number in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, sets the scene in Belleville, imagined by writer Emerald Fennell as an “aggressively picturesque” place whose supremely buffed citizens keep their dirty laundry out of sight.
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