NEW YORK — To use the Britney Spears catalog as the material for a musical preaching feminist enlightenment is, to put it mildly, a stretch. The now reclusive pop star’s heavily sexualized and self-objectifying body of work includes such fodder as “Baby One More Time,” (”hit me baby ...”), “Make Me” (”I just want you to make me move ...”) and, of course, the inimitable “Oops! I Did It Again,” wherein the singer declared she was “not that innocent.”
To no one’s surprise.
Sure, there has been the more recent #FreeBritney movement on social media and the long-troubled star, who is in her 40s, now is reasonably viewed as a victim of exploitation by family, the music industry and the entire aughts decade. Most things Spears, though, remain shrouded in mystery. The ideal jukebox Britney Spears show would imagine a star, or a fictional surrogate thereof, who came with great talent, neediness, complexity and vulnerability, riding on a knife edge of victimhood and ironic power, influencing the millions of impressionable teenagers who followed her music from around the globe for good and ill and defining her moment.
The truly awful “Once Upon a One More Time,” which opened on Broadway last week at the Marquis Theatre with direction and choreography by Keone and Mari Madrid and David Leveaux as creative consultant, is not that musical.
Instead, it tries to cash in on the repetitive fashion of the moralistic musical moment and use Spears’ songs as a way to critique and deconstruct “problematic” fairy tales. The show, written by Jon Hartmere, has a plot very, very much akin to “Bad Cinderella,” another disaster that trashed a beloved fairy tale, and to the current multi-artist jukebox show “& Juliette,” which looks like “Sweeney Todd” in comparison to the other two attractions. “Once Upon a One More Time” takes an apparent cue from #FreeBritney except that we’re watching a show about the emancipation of Snow White, the Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty, as led by that dangerous radical Cinderella.
The antagonist here is the Narrator, who comes with an authoritarian British accent, now a Broadway signal for evil. He’s played by the typically brilliant Adam Godley, last seen on Broadway in “The Lehman Trilogy” and who here just has to stand and bark commands like some Orwellian interloper ruining tea parties at the American Girl store. It goes on for two acts, god help us, and it is painful to watch.
So is most of the show, which stars Briga Heelan as Cinderella and Justin Guarini as a Prince Charming with a lot to learn. The plot, frankly, is nearly impossible to understand, which is absurd given the facile nature of the musical’s themes. There seems to be a semblance of an outer frame, wherein a little girl is reading a fairy tale, but that comes and goes and arrives again without cohesion. It’s never clear how all these fictional characters know each other (they seem to have a club) nor in what world they operate and under what rules. It’s not even clear why The Little Mermaid is losing and finding her voice. There are people with weird clutches of authority: the Narrator can trap princesses in not so happy ever after, apparently, and a hipster Original Fairy Godmother (Brooke Dillman) is powered by Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (she may even be Betty Friedan).
It’s all utterly bereft of any requisite grounding reality or narrative cohesion and there is nothing in the plot to make you even remotely look forward to Act 2. The only actor on the stage whose work makes even the remotest sense is Jennifer Simard, who is often funny as Cinderella’s sardonic Stepmother, the humor flowing entirely from the performer’s top-drawer comedic skills, not the book.
When you are trapped in one of these shows, the mind and heart usually go to the possibility of just enjoying the big musical numbers. Alas, if Spears comes to this show, she will not find her formidable vocal skills honored as she surely would wish. The singing is mediocre and often strained. It’s only in the number “Circus” that the show really delivers a worthy snapshot of a Spears concert, or at least the wild spectacle I remember seeing years ago. Buyer beware.
The rest of this summer dud is just a pale and pandering whitewash. The most inventive idea at the Marquis Theatre is the little photo booths available in the lobby that allows fans to put themselves in their own Britney story. Any of them surely would be better than this one.
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At the Marquis Theatre, 210 W. 46th St., New York; onemoretimemusical.com
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