In its announcement in 2018, Lloyd Webber promised that, in his collaboration with book writers Emerald Fennell (then just a promising young woman, before the release of Promising Young Woman) and Tom MacRae (who seems to have left the project since), Cinderella would become a “modern, feisty girl.” (Foreboding phrase, frankly.) A few years later, after the world had been rocked by both the pandemic and the Cats film, Cinderella opened in the West End in late 2021, with Fennell’s book and Lloyd Webber battling the headwinds of Britain’s COVID protocols along the way. Bad Cinderella first appeared a few years ago in London as simply Cinderella. To that, I don’t have an answer, but I can at least tell you how. Don’t ask me to try to hum any of its tunes, aside from the endlessly repeated title song. In fact, its occasional baseline competence makes it all the more insubstantial. It’s not a fiasco, or even a fiasca, because that would be more fun.

The rest of the thing melted over me like a sludge of sherbet: sticky-sweet, acid-toned, zero nutritional value, prone to give you a mild headache. I took a second to jot it down in big letters and draw a star next to it in my notes, because at least someone had said something memorable.

It’s also one of only a few lines that I can recall from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest not-so-mega musical, less than 24 hours after I saw it. Midway through Act One of Bad Cinderella, one of the stepsisters looks at Cinderella’s outfit and shouts, “It’s giving rags! It’s giving peasant!” I regret to inform you that this - meant to invoke already out-of-date internet lingo, itself cribbed from Black queer slang, that is so tired that by the time it reaches a Broadway stage you can’t help laughing at the stupidity - is the funniest line in Bad Cinderella.

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