"The faux-progressive pop musical, however, mostly ignores that potential. It generally attempts to try to cram liberal slogans into a musical form that was never designed to bear them."
. . ."One More Time is one of a spree of recent Broadway musicals that attempt, with various degrees of hamfistedness, to marry a bubblegum pop songbook to a politically progressive reinterpretation of an existing story. It’s as though, after the success of Hamilton, producers all over New York City ordered up message musicals with radio-friendly songbooks by the dozen. Only now are they beginning to realize that it’s actually pretty hard to make that combination work.
"First came Six. Arriving on Broadway in 2021 after originating in London, Six uses original songs heavily inspired by existing pop numbers to tell the tale of the six wives of Henry VIII, this time with more girl power. Following fast on its heels was 2022’s & Juliet, which uses the songs of Swedish megaproducer Max Martin to imagine a story where instead of killing herself after Romeo dies, Juliet goes to Paris to party with her genderqueer best friend. This spring came the show with the name that tempted fate: Bad Cinderella, another feminist take on the fairy tale. (Bad Cinderella closed in June after just 85 performances.) This time the songbook was provided by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the man who reinvented the Broadway pop musical in the 1980s." . . .
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