Cinderella Review – Rapping Over Mice, a Magic Microwave, and Some Great Songs | Christmas offers

CIndrila is going to the ball – only she first has to help her horrible stepmother with a disgusting vegetarian dinner. Co-creators Chris Bush and Ronnie Neal gave Cinders a modern, festive twist, complete with a magical microwave and an unforgettable costume change inside the refrigerator. As might be expected from Bush, the script is clever and honest, but it’s also very complex, falling somewhere between honest play and quick pantomime.

The Rose is committed to giving young actors a real chance on the main stage, and the cast is made up largely of Rose Youth Theater Company members, as well as six professional actors. The young actors are generally very good. A trio of cheese-obsessed mice rap and cackle and charm us all, and Jack Vernie is amazingly good as the deliciously camp and amazingly convincing cat, Mr. Bingles.

The best adaptations slip on as easily as Cinders’ golden slipper, but despite Owen Horsley’s stylish direction and a beautifully cheerful set from Ryan Dawson Laight, this production feels like a misfit. Doubts and questions continue to arise. Why on earth would nervous teenager Ella want to go to prom, let alone marry a prince? Why are her younger sisters reimagined as full-grown women? What’s all this talk about the prince’s bewildering plight, which means he can’t recognize faces, and are we really supposed to believe that the brilliant young Ella wants to live inside a fantasy world forever?

Only when Ella returns to her real life do Matt Winkworth’s songs—merely skits up to this point—begin to gain power, suddenly loaded with emotion and purpose. Cara Lily Hayworth brings frustration, sadness and longing to “The Witching Hour” as she sings about falling in love with her “impossible” stepdaughter. Maddie Hunter, as Ella, embodies the difficulty of a blended family in I Remember so poignantly. There’s a beautiful play hiding here – a knock-out story of the love between a stepmother and stepdaughter – that emerges in dramatic bursts but gets lost in the noise and hubbub.