“It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.”
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“This promising conceit, though, turns out to be in vain. ’Bad Cinderella’ is a box of costume jewels: flashy but short on value...is the kind of show that seems destined to be left behind. It’s a shiny glass slip-up.”
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"Despite McLean’s humorous victories, 'Bad Cinderella' is a flimsy, uninspired shadow that invests no confidence in its characters and chugs along without a thesis. "
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“...'Bad Cinderella' piles on a series of complications and convenient coincidences, accelerating away from anything resembling either the story you know or reasonable human psychology.”
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“ ‘Bad Cinderella’ both celebrates the discarding of traditional ideas of attractiveness, and what place they might take in relationships, and at the same time doubles back and affirms them. In any case, it’s not a musical that warrants serious analysis.”
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“By the time it reaches its happily-ever-after ending – the musical doesn’t pretend for a moment it won’t get there – ’Bad Cinderella’ leaves us both more or less satisfied and more or less disappointed.”
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“Lloyd Webber has penned a self-defining title number, which is catchy and belted out by Genao with genuine chops. There are a couple of ballads that his fans should enjoy and a few moments of that signature Lloyd Webber wall of sound, which is a positive trigger for me of so much of my early affection for musicals.”
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“To clear up the obvious question, ‘Bad Cinderella,’ which opened at the Imperial Theater Thursday night, isn’t good...it is a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairy tale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot.”
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