Gossip About The New Cinderella

As you may have heard, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella will get an April workshop with the intent of an eventual Broadway mounting, if all goes bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

I ran into playwright Douglas Carter Beane before a performance of his musical Lysistrata Jones last night, and he told me the Cinderella script he’ll do will be very “Fractured Fairy Tale, but warm.”

He also said there’ll be a cut song from South Pacific in the show. (Yes, a song was cut from South Pacific!)

“But who will play the wicked stepmother?” I wondered.

Beane said he approached Julie White, who won a Tony for his play The Little Dog Laughed.

Once she realized it was a musical, White said, “I took up smoking so I don’t have to do musicals. I can’t sing!”

Another Tony winner, Harriet Harris, took over the part for a reading.

Then White called Beane, saying, “I just heard myself singing in the shower. Maybe I can sing after all.”

Can he work her in?

“Maybe [the stepmother] can have a sister from the South of France,” he said, smiling.