Once Upon a One More Time had its debut on Broadway at long last, with full support of the icon who inspired it all.
A lot has happened with Britney Spears since the show was first workshopped. Via Hollywood Reporter:
The show set a pre-Broadway run in Chicago for 2019 that was pushed to 2020 before the pandemic shut down the live theater industry across the country. But in December 2021, Once Upon a One More Time held its world premiere at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, months before a Los Angeles judge officially ended Spears’ conservatorship. Ahead of the show’s opening, Nederlander and Arnold confirmed the musical is fully authorized and licensed by Britney Spears, and that the license agreement was negotiated, agreed to and signed post-conservatorship by the Grammy-winner in 2022.
Britney posted before opening night:
Good luck to the hardworking cast and crew of “Once Upon a One More Time” on opening night tonight 🌹💃🏼✨ !!! I’ve seen the show and it is so funny, smart and brilliant 🤩 !!!
The show is produced with Britney’s blessing after the conservatorship ended. Producers are James L. Nederlander and Hunter Arnold. It’s written by Jon Hartmere. It’s directed-choreographed by Keone and Mari Madrid.
Vulture describes the premise:
Cinderella (Briga Heelan of the late lamented Great News) and a group of other public-domain princesses work as professional reenactors of bedtime fairy tales. They have what amounts to Old Hollywood studio contracts, in that they have little say over their material, are constantly told they should be grateful for their happy endings, and are bossed around by a wispy mean man (Adam Godley’s Narrator) who talks down to them. At the outset, Cinderella feels a vague dissatisfaction with her life that she can’t quite articulate, whereupon the “notorious” Original Fairy Godmother (Brooke Dillman) appears and presents her with a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Cinderella’s already a reader, and she leads her fellow princesses in a “scroll club” gathering, but the concepts of both bound pages and “the problem that has no name” are thrilling to her, so Friedan’s writing kicks off a consciousness-raising revolution in fairy-tale land. Soon, Cinderella is starting to insist on changes to her storyline, pissing off the Narrator, her prince (From Justin to Kelly’s Justin Guarini), and her evil stepmother (the eternally underutilized Jennifer Simard).
Image: Once Upon a One More Time
