"When a girl needs to express," Diana belts, "her proper state of distress, revenge looks best in a f-k you dress. Each song offers up its own evidence, but the banality is distinctly center stage when Diana, who knew the power of designer fashion, famously uses it to turn the tables on Charles as he goes public about his long-running affair with married Camilla Parker Bowles. While pop-rock rhythms and melodies actually feel right for the People's Princess, the score is larded with limp lyrics and predictable rhymes. Naughty little black dress? Check - more on that in a minute. Instead, this team, which also made Memphis, cherry-picked Wikipedia-worthy moments and raided Diana's closet for famous outfits recreated here by William Ivey Long. The show's creators - Joe DiPietro, who wrote the book and shares credit for lyrics with composer David Bryan - don't seem interested in getting more than skin deep. Diana's life was packed with exploitations, rocky romances, and scandals, yes, but the woman died an agonizing death in a Paris car wreck in 1997. Handling Diana's story with kitsch gloves seems an odd choice from director Christopher Ashley, who won a Tony Award for the warm, feel-good 9/11-themed musical Come From Away. Diana's 11 o'clock ditty about how she'll "light the world" doesn't balance the scales. That includes a cameo and commentary by her step-grandmother, romance novelist Barbara Cartland, gushing and gabbing in an explosion of Pepto Bismol pink. Too bad what awaits for subjects of the Great White Way is Diana: The Musical, a vacant and vapid royal rehash.īesides lacking a compelling point of view to make this familiar tale fresh, the slick musical retread tends to take a campy approach as it chronicles Diana's tumultuous marriage to the ever-unfaithful Prince Charles. It was only a matter of time before it was churned into a Broadway bio-musical. An enduring global icon nearly 25 years after her death, Princess Diana's fractured fairytale story has been mined extensively and spun into books, TV shows, and movies.
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