Once Upon A Horrible Time For Girl Power
(A Review and Reflection of Once Upon A One More Time)
Written by Eri Castro
I don't understand what went wrong with Once Upon A One More Time. I genuinely don't. I had the slightest hope that it would be something I'd cherish, but it turned out to be the most insipid mush of girl power slogans and perfectly well-behaved princesses, as its cringy marketing slogan suggests, “Well Behaved Princesses Rarely Make History”. Well, it appears that well-behaved musicals rarely make history if they stick to their cookie-cutter corporate slop. The Narrator's famous quip, “We’re not here to make fairy tales, we’re here to follow them”, is only just a testimony that mainstream theater is too comfortable barfing up uninspired and generic musicals just to make enough profit off of tourists based only on recognizable IP and musical artists, and not by taking risks on hopeful creators with groundbreaking ideas that could revolutionize Broadway.
Once Upon A One More Time takes place in a fairytale dimension where the Narrator orders every fairytale character to repeat the same stories on an endless loop for the “readers”, aka the humans, to enjoy. While everyone enjoys performing their loop for eternity, Cinderella suddenly experiences a malfunction in her mental system. She is part of a six-member Scroll Club (mind you, they don’t have books in their time), and she suddenly experiences an existential crisis while reading Little Mermaid’s tale. “Is this happy ever after?" Cinderella asks the Princesses, causing them to scream and gasp in horror, "I wish I could just hang onto both slippers for a change, or stay out past midnight or.." "Not get poisoned?" "Rock my natural curls?" "Sleep through the night." "Have a drama-free christening!" "Maybe it's just me…” Cinderella ponders out into the unknown, dreaming of another world, as well as the Princesses following behind her. This is where the show is at its most interesting. You'd think they would go into some deep territory that would raise the characters' consciousness. Unfortunately, it nosedives into the most dated, racist, and one-dimensional form of feminism in recent memory, even worse and more hollow than the league of live-action girlboss Disney remakes of Mulan, Aladdin, and Snow White, and it's all pivoted by one racist, classist, lesbophobic book from the 1960s, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.
"The stories you've been reading and living, they can be limiting and frankly, deeply problematic towards certain people; they can give you a very warped view of the world! You know, the real world! Out there! Beyond story's end! Women do write, and they influence, and they agitate!" OFG boasts about women in the real world, but it's all reduced to a lecture about Oprah, Betty Friedan, and Suffragettes striking for the right to vote; it's like she's teaching the audience like little babies about the history of girl power and feminism. Compare this to Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, where Barbie learns about the imperfections and anxieties of being a woman in the real world and still choosing to become human because it's unscripted, because you will suffer, because you will feel hopeless, yet you experience joy, and girlhood, and getting old, and beauty that comes with it. Maybe that is what our Cinderella really wanted, to be truly human, but nope, it's just feminism and rebellion she wanted! Worst of all, the OFG, at the end, might be confirmed to be.. Betty Friedan herself?! In 2023 FLATBUSH?!?! HOW DOES IT MAKE ANY SENSE??
I do NOT understand why they chose the Feminine Mystique out of all of this. You can tell all of this is written by a man because Jon Hartmere does not even understand feminism, nor does he have the experience of what being a woman is like. If an all-male team is trusted to bring such an idea to life, I don’t know if I had any hope for any of the female characters to have some bit of dimension or relatability to them. At the very least, they could’ve had a female creative consultant or writer to help them out. Despite the advertising focusing on all six princesses getting equal focus, the show barely delivers on the sisterhood that was promised.
The other five princesses, POC and full of different colors, are delegated to the background for white Cinderella to get her focus. Black Snow White is being chased in the woods by the huntsman, who wants to carve out her heart, and yet we're supposed to focus on Cinderella's "tear-jerking" ennui and boredom with her life. It's like the black/POC characters matter less than the white blondes. Snow White and Rapunzel are reduced to sassy black sidekicks, with Rapunzel saying a throwaway gag about not touching her braid, and Snow White, for some inexplicable reason, being the darkest girl in the group, has so many questionable jokes about not being able to read or write or go to school. The Princess and the Pea, Sleeping Beauty, Little Mermaid, might as well not have existed cause they're so flat and one-dimensional. Prince Charming gets all of the humor and charm, while Cinderella and her female crusade are just downgraded to just a bunch of crusaders that don't get to be thought-provoking, funny, or vulnerable. Sometimes the show promises to deliver something worth saying, but what? There's a throwaway gag where Cinderella mentions she doesn't get paid, and it's never mentioned again. The Narrator calls the protesting princesses strident and shrill, which sounds so forced. The princesses hold a million princesses march, but it's all represented with flashy, new, modern costumes instead of personal character growth, and they constantly say they want to escape Story's End to live in the "great, mighty kingdom of Flatbush," but they never get there. This musical is so insufferably misguided in this attempt to make us believe the characters want to be human, but by means of following a white feminist agenda that doesn't respect them. They don't even say that they WANT to become human. That would be deep and provoking. No, OUAOMT doesn't want to be deep and provoking; it's just turning your brain off and dancing to Britney Spears' music, but ... is that what audiences want?
The show feels like it's stuck in a trap; it wants to speak to feminism in the modern age with heart, yet it's too afraid to challenge the audience with deep, provoking questions, because the audience is apparently too dumb or too vulnerable, and they just want to dance to recognizable jukebox music instead of riding home about a radical, thought-provoking story. Everything feels so limited to the standard American musical tropes, the overexaggeratedly sassy black stereotype Rapunzel, the undesirable fat Stepsister, the cheating Prince Charming, the mute Ariel's loss of voice being treated as a running gag to make the audience laugh when she mimes a sentence, as horrible as Snow White's dwarf friend Clumsy constantly falling and tripping when he exits the stage with an overused crash and cat howling sound effect that makes me groan more than laugh, the flat cartoony villain Narrator ("It’s ruined! Centuries of tradition lost, and on my watch! Cinderella has destroyed everything! She’ll pay!), and a general wash of token diversity amongst the other five princesses without ever get to hear their side of the story or having to care about every one of them, because the protagonist is more important apparently, the women fighting back while the men (the Narrator and Princes) attempt to strike back like angry villains who want control. No one feels real, no one feels human; they feel written to the standard storytelling script, so why should we care about anyone here? I still can't believe all of it was written by a man!
The character development from "Is this happy ever after?" to "I've had enough, I'm not your property!" feels so standard, so it's no wonder why this show flopped hard with only 123 performances on Broadway. Think about the last time a Broadway musical had a cultural impact on people. Think about how they've managed to stay on the Great White Way for years because they strive to bring something new and exciting. Hadestown brought a New Orleans jazz and indie rock sound to Broadway, which was unexpected. Hamilton infused hip-hop and rap into a classic opera format. Hair was the first ever rock musical on Broadway, which changed the game at the time. Wicked challenged us to see the Wicked Witch of the West in a sympathetic light while giving Elphaba and Glinda grey morality and complexities. Even Into the Woods did everything OUAOMT wanted to do, but in a better and more groundbreaking way in terms of storytelling, because it focused on the human experience of growing up and the harsh realities of adulthood, and that was about 40 years ago! That is what audiences want, something that sticks in their minds, something to ride home about. So why did I constantly tap my toes in frustration, constantly waiting every day for the moment when Broadway announces a new, original, high-concept musical that audiences are actually hungry for and actually want to see? When is it gonna happen? Why are we still waiting?!
Actually, with that in mind, I want to take this moment to focus on something that is actually different and changes the game in terms of musical storytelling: Epic the Musical. That concept album became so popular because it brought the story of Homer's Odyssey to an epic musical scale, and was developed on TikTok, and fans made a ton of animatics about it. It blends classic musical theater with pop music that is unique to each character, making it addictive to TikTok audiences. That is where the future of musicals lies, not in flashy costumes, or girl power slogans, or marketable choreography and music, but instead, in something innovative and different that speaks directly to the audience, something with meaningful steps towards inclusion. If we learned anything from the colossal failure of Once Upon A One More Time, it's that we are more likely to create ideas that inspire audiences, instead of regurgitating the same ideas over and over again for a quick buck. We don't need another &Juliet, we need the next Hamilton. So I offer this question that I hope will get answered: "In the future, what musical will we create if we actually decide to do something.. different?"
