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.
More:Michael MustoTheater