Theatre in Review: Ever After (Paper Mill Playhouse)

	Christine Ebersole, Mara Davi. Photo: Jerry Dalia

In a world filled with reimaginings, reboots, and revisals, is there really room for yet another take on the Cinderella story? Ever After has been in development for years, so its creators cannot be entirely happy to be getting a full-blown, Broadway-ready production so soon after Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella concluded a nearly two-year Broadway run. They must be even less happy about Kenneth Branagh's hit film, released this spring. Admittedly, Ever After, based on the 1998 film of the same name, has something different to offer. The question is, it is different enough?

Marcy Heisler's book, taken from the screenplay by Susannah Grant, Andy Tennant, and Rick Parks, strips out the magical fairy-tale elements from the well-known story: Gone are the fairy godmother, the pumpkin carriage, and the mice/footmen. There is a slipper, but it is made of far sturdier stuff than glass. Perhaps as a nod to Charles Perrault, Cinderella's originator, the setting is medieval Paris and its rural environs. The heroine is named Danielle. Other new additions include an evil money lender, slavery, a band of alternately thieving and heroic gypsies, and Leonardo da Vinci.

The prologue establishes Danielle as a feisty little thing living with her widowed father in a rural manor that, in its lack of class structure, almost resembles a kibbutz. (Not for nothing does Danielle dwell on Thomas More's Utopia, a treasured gift from her father.) Things rapidly go south when Danielle's father, Auguste, shows up with his new wife, Baroness Rodmilla, who is predictably horrified at all the happiness around her. ("Can you believe I'm going to have a stepmother of my own?" asks little Danielle, a line destined to provoke hoots of laughter from the cynics in the audience.) The book never explains exactly why Auguste marries this shrill social climber, but the point is moot, because he quickly dies, Danielle is relegated to the servants' quarters, and the Baroness begins the long process of selling off everything valuable in the house in order finance her preferred standard of living.

Despite her abusive treatment, Danielle grows into a freethinking intellectual with little use for men. Her first encounter with the prince, here named Henry, devolves into her pelting him with apples. Later, to save one of her fellow servants from being shipped, as an indentured servant, to America, Danielle enters the palace in disguise; this time she beguiles Henry, who has upset his parents by refusing an arranged marriage to a Spanish princess. Henry is then given five days to select a suitable wife, whose name will be announced at a ball to be given in honor of da Vinci, who is visiting for no particular reason. You can take it from there.

Or maybe you can't. The script works hard to find new twists on an all-too-familiar narrative, an approach that suffers from two major problems. Even though Ever After precedes Douglas Carter Beane's book for the revised Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, many of their innovations overlap. These include an aimless adolescent prince in need of life coaching from a winsome ingénue, and one wicked and one sympathetic stepsister, the latter of whom gets nothing but tough love from her mother. Also, no matter how many variations on the theme are offered, this is still the Cinderella story, and we all know where it ends up; the many challenges facing Danielle amount to so many artificial roadblocks and quickly become tiresome.

Kathleen Marshall's production is packed to the rafters with Broadway regulars. Margo Seibert bubbles with energy and high spirits as Danielle, especially in the number "Who Needs Love?" ("A knight in shining armor is just one more thing to dust.") But the character, as conceived, is so self-sufficient that it takes forever for her and Henry to click romantically. James Snyder gifts Henry with his good looks and glorious voice, heard to best advantage in the first-act closer, "Out of the Darkness," but, as the most confused and self-involved young aristocrat since Pippin, he doesn't come into focus until the final scenes. Even then, he bursts into a country house ready to save Danielle from a villain, only to find she has the malefactor pinned to the wall with a pair of swords; he may be the most irrelevant fairy-tale hero ever. Christine Ebersole classes up every role she plays, and the Baroness is no exception. Applying her cut-glass diction to an even halfway decent line ("Some people read books because they can't think for themselves.") she earns a laugh, and when she describes her own peculiar form of mother love in the number "After All" or squares off against Danielle in a bitter duet titled "It's Done," Ever After starts to acquire a sharp-edged profile of its own.

Also in the cast: Mara Davi is the meanest girl in France as Danielle's wicked stepsister. As the nicer one, the plumpish Annie Funke takes the brunt of the Baroness' evil cracks about her weight until she lands a boyfriend in the form of Charl Brown, cast as Henry's sidekick. Charles Shaughnessy and Julie Halston charm as Henry's worried parents, but why cast Halston if you're not going to give her the opportunity to be hilarious? Tony Sheldon is a warm, engaging presence as Leonardo, who exists to provide relationship counseling for Danielle and Henry. Liz McCartney and Nick Corley are fine as Danielle's scullery colleagues -- he's the one saved from slavery -- and Andrew Keenan-Bolger makes the most of his few appearances as their son, a gifted artist who catches Leonard's professional eye. John Hillner is appropriately smarmy as the moneylender who would like to get his hands on Danielle. And the gifted dancer Seán Martin Hingston is stalwart as the leader of the band of gypsies who, for reasons too silly to go into, decide that Danielle is their queen, coming and going as the plot requires.

Heisler and the composer, Zina Goldrich, are best known for witty, satirical cabaret numbers, such as "Taylor, the Latte Boy," but here they stage a full-scale invasion of Alan Menken territory, rolling out inspirational ballads by the yard. The score is thoroughly competent and technically skilled without almost ever being distinctive. If you listened to it without knowing its provenance, you'd swear that Disney had a new musical ready to go. This is the rare Marshall production with very little dance: Hingston leads the male chorus in something called "All Hail the Gypsy Queen," which, oddly, consists of a variety of Muscovite dance moves.

Derek McLane's set design is framed by two multilevel scaffolds, which are surprisingly underused, but he and his co-projection designer Olivia Sebesky provide a series of sumptuously detailed images of country manors, farm fields, throne rooms, and palace gardens, most of them seemingly taken from 19th-century romantic paintings. Peter Kaczorowski's lighting provides interesting color treatments for the scaffolds and genuinely guides the audience through this crowded, teeming-with-characters narrative with his usual practiced skill. Jess Goldstein's costumes -- stunningly embroidered and delicately colored gowns for the ladies and sensuously tailored doublets, trousers, and boots for the men -- are among his finest recent offerings. I have long complained about the poor acoustics in Paper Mill Playhouse, but Nevin Steinberg seems to have solved that problem, hands down. Every last word of the score, even in the chorus numbers, is entirely intelligible.

If nothing else, Ever After demonstrates the pitfalls of writing musical theatre in the 21st century: Shows sometimes languish so long in development that, by the time they produced, they can feel a little passé. When it started out, it must have seemed like a fresh idea, but now it looks like just another musical aimed at the tweener-early teenager demographic. Is there room for it on Broadway? I would imagine that Elphaba, Galinda, Gigi, Matilda, and even Princess Jasmine will have something to say about that. -- David Barbour