Simply Cinderella (Leicester)

“Where are the new British musicals going to come from?” asks a programme note for Simply Cinderella, the first production at Leicester’s controversial new Curve theatre. Sadly not from here, although the Curve deserves at least one brownie point for trying something different to launch the city’s much heralded new venue.

The problem is that audiences will come to this show with high expectations. It’s panto time, the title says “Cinderella” and you sort of expect to see something like the traditional story with a couple of nasty dames, a beautiful heroine, a lovelorn Buttons and plenty of fun and laughter along the way.

Well, in Savannah Stevenson’s Cinders and Emma-Jane Appleyard and Jenna Boyd’s Coral and Pearl we get the first three ingredients but unfortunately for festive audiences the other elements are all missing. This is Cinderella Tracy Beaker-style, where the nastier side of modern life intrudes a little too far and the traditional fairy-tale ending gets a boot up the backside.

Simply Cinderella is set in a shoe factory where the heroine grinds away in industrial drudgery while dreaming of her own creations of Blahnik proportions. Arriving home on her 18th birthday she suffers cruel and malicious teasing at the hands of her stepsisters and feckless mother. A mysterious letter hints that the bejewelled dancing shoes she has created hold the key to future happiness.

The ghost of her mother then materialises to reveal that the factory where she works was once the Cinderella Ballroom at the Palace Hotel. Lured to the factory in the dead of night she finds herself transported back to the hotel’s opening night in 1939 and becomes besotted by Raj Ghatak’s handsome Prince of Rhythm before the New Year chimes send her right back to the present day.

Grant Olding (music and lyrics) and Toby Davis (book) have done a workmanlike job of attempting a new telling of the Cinderella story but somehow it fails on most fronts. Cinders’ eventual triumph over adversity is unconvincing and fails to inspire, while the overall feel is generally downbeat and dismal. Even the love interest fails to convince with not the faintest spark of chemistry between the Prince and his gal.

However, full marks go to designer Francis O’Connor with Chris Ellis and Ben Harrison on lighting and sound design respectively. There are moments that are simply stunning; Cinderella’s three-storey house that sinks into the stage to allow her attic bedroom to unfold is a triumph and the transformations from factory to ballroom and back magical to watch – a sign of technical excellence that only serves to mark the paucity of the production overall.

The saddest thing for the new theatre is that family audiences will be lured to see the show on the presumption that they will see something with a touch of seasonal sparkle, but I feel that youngsters, along with their parents and grandparents, will feel a tinge of disappointment that this production doesn’t live up to their reasonable expectations.

– Nick Brunger