Once Upon a One More Time Broadway Reviews

This timidity is but one example of the ways in which the show comes up short, both as a feminist text and as a tribute to Spears’s songbook — and, yes, her life. The last thing her fans might have expected from a Britney Spears musical is dutiful conventionality.

Amid all the bright lights, loud sound and frenetic staging—at one point, Guarini swings from a chandelier—the musical’s most powerful weapon is its least effortful one: musical-comedy genius Jennifer Simard’s thoroughly original spin on Cinderella’s devious stepmother. With deadpan command and a somehow lugubrious flounce, she brings wit to each word she speaks or sings, whether laying waste to “Toxic” or, flanked by her washout daughters (Tess Soltau and Ann Hillner Larsen), telling the not-yet-liberated Cinderella to “Work Bitch.” Simard is delicious; the rest of the show, if you turn off your brain, is merely yummy in a candy-coated way. That’s not nothing: Once Upon a One More Time is a well-assembled and entertaining diversion. But this is now the third musical currently running on Broadway that features at least one Britney song, and that should give theater lovers pause. Musicals are capable of more ambitious roles than merely carrying Spears.

In any case, “Once Upon a One More Time” is a dizzy but enjoyable goof, similar in many ways to “& Juliet.” That show offers an upbeat feminist rewrite of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set to songs (mostly) by Max Martin, who wrote some of Ms. Spears’s big hits. Broadway doom-watchers can now decry the fact that not one, not two, but three musicals on the boards feature songs made famous by Ms. Spears. (The third is “Moulin Rouge!,” although it contains only a smidgen.)

Bad Cinderella could have been the poison apple that killed off revisionist fairy tales once and for all, but Britney Spears and Once Upon A One More Time, the new Broadway musical opening tonight that brims with her hits and high spirits, has come along to deliver a happy ever after that’s as unexpected as it is enchanting. Smart, funny, splendid to look at and all with a beat you can dance to, this tribute to the Brothers Grimm, the sisters of the Second Wave and, not least, the indomitable Ms. Spears, is a delight.

The dreadful show, which opened Thursday night at the Marquis Theatre, takes the pop songs of Britney Spears and plops them willy-nilly in a feminist Cinders in which the main character realizes there’s more to life than falling in love with a prince. Good for you, Cindy, but wouldn’t it be nice if you were both a freethinking, independent woman and your musical’s story made a lick of sense? It’s bibbidi-bobbidi-brainless. Instead of crafting compelling characters or a gripping plot, book writer Jon Hartmere has combined dance floor tunes from the aughts and half-baked, teacher’s-pet ideas into shapeless mush. “Once Upon” is rarely fun, but always cloying and impossible to follow.

While its main conflict may resolve itself a bit too easily in the end — not unlike its source material — Once Upon a One More Time is a youthful, exuberant take on beloved tales that's more dazzling and polished than Cinderella's glass slipper. Expect to keep on dancin' long after the musical ends. Grade: B+

I suppose we could sit and enumerate the ways these princesses, sitting pretty in their “Lucky” lives but cry-cry-crying for emancipation, reflect the pop diva’s own battle for freedom. That’s there if you want it, and it’ll be there for every young girl, gay, and they in the audience looking for some empowerment. But Once Upon a One More Time pays its truest homage to Britney, not by wringing its hands over how to make pop serious, but through its bouncy understanding of fierce fun with laser-sharp choreography. Don’t overthink it, just intoxicate yourself.

What do you get by crossing “Six” with “& Juliet”? No, “Bad Cinderella” was last season. Today, that mash-up of two similar musicals gives you the slightly better Cinderella show, which has been tortuously titled “Once Upon a One More Time.” This new jukebox tuner, which recycles songs written and/or performed by Britney Spears, opened Thursday at the Marquis Theatre after its world premiere at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

I tried to approach “Once Upon a One More Time” with an open mind but eventually gave in to the reality that all of the songs sound the same (“Oops” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” are musically indistinguishable), the plotting is draggy and disjointed, he staging (with direction and choreography by Keone Madrid and Mari Madrid) is a hot mess, and the concept has been done before.

If you run fast enough across Times Square, you might be able to see two Broadway takes on “Oops!… I Did It Again” in one evening. Given that Once Upon a One More Time follows those shows in this mini-genre (not to mention their sparkly, belty, much better fairy godmother Six), you might have reason to hope that it refines and improves upon the tropes. Instead, it’s reductive and pandering, hitting all the expected marks without any unique spark.

How do you not get “Baby One More Time” right? That is the first mystery—and the first warning that all may not be well—with Once Upon a One More Time, the musical filled with Britney Spears’ music that opened on Broadway Thursday evening (Marquis Theatre, booking to Nov 19). Truly, if you’re doing this magnificent banger, don’t kick off your big Broadway jukebox musical with it feeling as messy as this musical does. Frankly, this may not matter to the Spears faithful having the time of their lives at this show. Seeing the fans crowd the foyer is one of the most unexpected, life-giving joys of the New York summer. The Marquis has made the musical into a fun night out, complete with themed photo booths, and the audience this critic attended were bubbling with joy just to be there, dressed up in sparkly tops and their Britney finest. But even for them, one sensed—given the audience responses—the musical hit big at some moments, but did not hit big throughout.

You're handed an LED wristband as you enter “Once Upon a One More Time,” a musical on Broadway stuffed with Britney Spears songs. But the gift is strangely inert for the whole show, only coming to life and gleaming at the curtain call. It's not a wristband — it's a metaphor. It glows in the end because you are free. Free of this bombastic, patronizing, clumsy, lazy show. “Once Upon a One More Time,” which opened Thursday at the Marquis Theatre, is pure summer dumb — it's got smoke machines working overtime, weird dance breaks, tons of glitter and every song ends with a manufactured IMAX-level sonic boom.

Once Upon a One More Time is certainly not the first piece of media interested in putting a modern, empowering spin on fairytales — even the notion of the 'strong independent princess' has become a tale as old as time. But it certainly is the most fun. Spears's hits and impeccable dancing from director/choreographers Keone and Mari Madrid make Once Upon a One More Time an irresistible party. And quite frankly, that's what I want from a Britney Spears musical more than anything else.

The truly awful “Once Upon a One More Time,” which opened on Broadway Thursday night 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 “& Juliet,” 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.

Friedan’s magnum opus is not the easiest gateway tract, but no matter: it’s only cited as a shorthand signifier. What Friedan in the supposed flesh is doing in this jukebox musical is the real puzzler. Let’s hope that her estate is being duly recompensed for the use of her personage, because her message has been perverted here into mere tokenism. If you really want to honor Friedan’s legacy, consider sitting this one out and contributing instead to one of the causes she fiercely espoused, such as the ever-elusive Equal Rights Amendment promising bodily autonomy – a basic that Spears herself no doubt holds dear.

I’ll leave it to the theater historians and pundits to debate the ramifications of this turn of events in Broadway musical theater. My job, such as it is, is to report on how well the show’s creators succeed in fulfilling their artistic aspirations. Of course, that’s assuming they have any. Based on the fact that it distributes free glowing bracelets to every audience member to wave in the air for the inevitable megamix during the curtain call, they’re not exactly straining for Sondheim-level depth. Rather, they simply want their target audience to have a good time; not, as the characters in Seinfeld used to sheepishly say, that there’s anything wrong with that. The problem is that this latest revisionist exhumation of fairy tales arrives shortly after such superior examples of the burgeoning genre as the recent revival of Into the Woods and & Juliet (not a fairy tale, I know, but it feels like one) and such far worse examples as Bad Cinderella. It’s beginning to seem as if Broadway is less a destination for the tired businessman than the tired tyke who didn’t get in their nap. Not that they’d be able to sleep through this show if they tried, since the volume is pumped up to the sort of deafening levels you’d expect at, well, a Britney Spears concert.

The Madrids attempt to express the declarations of freedom and defiance in the Spears songbook through their angular movement, but there’s no particular development of choreographic style over the show’s 2½ hours. The exhilaration wears off as the moves repeat again and again. Too much tutting, and a show set in a fantasyland starts to look like a recycled concert routine.

Nor did I expect to yearn for a jukebox bio-musical about her. But instead of a gutsy, passionate recounting of the pop star’s stardom, struggles, and fight for control over her legacy and wealth, we have a marketing gimmick. Impale the bait of a blockbuster catalog on a feminist and queer hook (a spare prince falls in love with one of the Seven Dwarfs) and reel in a cross-generational revenue stream.

If “Once Upon a One More Time,” opening at Broadway’s Marriott Marquis Theater tonight, is clearly not strikingly original, the story does have a few distinctive touches, and the production Broadway-level pleasures. The design is flashy, and the choreography is thrilling. The talented cast is game, featuring such reliably delightful Broadway veterans as Justin Guarini as a two-timing Prince Charming and Jennifer Simard as the scheming Stepmother, as well as the impressively weight-bearing Broadway debut of Briga Heelan as Cinderella. But the show is probably best appreciated by taking the advice offered in a different context in the musical by a character called the Narrator: “Don’t overthink it.”