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Although the show is entertaining, it's undermined by a so-so book and score.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 30, 2000
TAMPA -- The national tour of Cinderella tries hard to be more than just a show geared toward families seeking holiday entertainment, with resourceful staging and an appealing cast. There's even a female impersonator playing the wicked Stepmother.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that has been reconceived for the stage from various television productions had its premiere Tuesday night at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
If the adaptation by Tom Briggs dragged from time to time for an adult, there were plenty of dressed-up little girls in the audience who appeared to be enthralled by the age-old fairy tale.
But in the end, Cinderella is undermined by a book and a score that just aren't that great.
Eartha Kitt, whose theatrical roots reach back to Broadway in the 1940s, gets top billing as the Fairy Godmother, and she mixes ethereal stage presence and jokey irony in equal measure, part diva, part Catwoman.
Top-40 teen idol turned stage ingenue Deborah Gibson plays the title role, and she is very much a contemporary kind of Cinderella, with her melismatic treatment of songs such as The Sweetest Sounds. Gibson has the swooping, pop-inflected style of singing that drives theater purists crazy, but it's undoubtedly here to stay.
Paolo Montalban is a dashing young Prince. His duets with Gibson are suitably romantic and touching, especially The Cinderella Waltz, a number reminiscent of another ballroom scene from a more dramatically engaging Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I.
Clocking in at two hours, including intermission, the first performance of Cinderella was fairly free of glitches. Montalban couldn't settle on a pitch in Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?, and Kitt was virtually inaudible in the disheveled finale, There's Music in You. The ageless star's attention was fixed on conductor John Mezzio, who mouthed the lyrics to her from the pit.
After the wildly popular 1957 Cinderella on TV, which starred Julie Andrews, there was probably a good reason that Rodgers and Hammerstein never got around to staging the show themselves, aside from its coming late in their careers together. Their greatest musicals -- Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, even The Sound of Music -- were first and foremost compelling, sometimes quirky stories.
The characters of Cinderella are just too airy to bring out the best of Hammerstein's playwriting and lyrical gifts, and the colloquialisms of today -- "I love you guys," says the Prince to his parents, King Maximillian (Ken Prymus) and Queen Constantina (Leslie Becker) -- don't add anything. Nor is the score really top-drawer Rodgers. Two of the songs -- The Sweetest Sounds and There's Music in You -- were taken from other shows.
Director Gabriel Barre's production is nothing if not up to date in regard to musical theater trends. Browbeaten by her stepfamily, Cinderella seeks consolation in a menagerie of mice, birds and other creatures depicted by puppets, an effect not unlike that of The Lion King, though black-clad actors operate the puppet rods.
Taking a cue from the 1997 TV production, the stage Cinderella has a multi-ethnic cast and a vaguely modern look. The costumes (Pamela Scofield), scenery (James Youmans) and lighting (Tim Hunter) combine to evoke a rich range of fluorescent-hued imagery from a Turkish bazaar to a glittering coach on the verge of turning back into a pumpkin.
And like Victor/Victoria, Chicago and other recent shows, Cinderella goes in for a little gender-bending, with none other than Everett Quinton, a peerless actor, playing the Stepmother with a perfect blend of restraint and over-the-top craziness.
"Cheap cloth, Cinderella," Quinton's Stepmother hisses, delivering the put-down of her dress with Bette Davis relish.
What's a mother to do? Quinton's red-haired virago has the hopeless task of trying to marry off her daughters: Grace (NaTasha Yvette Williams) is afflicted with a permanent itch, and Joy (Alexandra Kolb) has a voice that would peel paint.
When the sisters launch into the Stepsister's Lament, they give Cinderella its finest comic number.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella runs through Sunday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets: $22.50-$64.50; (813) 229-7827; www.tbpac.org.