Magic glimmers throughout “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” bedazzling the stage through Jan. 9 at the Drury Lane Theatre. With songs like “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful” and “Impossible,” Richard Rodgers’ score and Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics are beyond reproach, pure romance in auditory form from sweeping overture to the soaring finale.
Paired with Douglas Carter Beane’s new book — a savvy, funny update on the one Hammerstein wrote for “Cinderella’s” original CBS 1957 television broadcast — that lush and majestic score spins family-friendly, storytelling gold.
Directed and choreographed by Amber Mak with music direction from Carolyn Brady, the Oakbrook Terrace production is a fairy tale rich in all the genre demands: glitter-and-tulle-draped castles, sparkle-dusted gowns, magical creatures, enchanted woods.
In a balletic prologue, we see an infant Ella ultimately bereft of both parents, left with a stepmother who treats her like an indentured servant.
From here, the production follows the familiar — to a point — plot. Ella (Lissa deGuzman) lives with her stepmother Madame (Gisela Adisa), and Madame’s daughters Gabrielle (Christine Mayland Perkins) and Charlotte (Alanna Lovely). Adisa’s Madame is sadistic and imperious and, with her daughters, treats Ella in less than kindly fashion.
As Ella toils, local heir to the throne Prince Topher (Jeffrey Kringer) throws a ball to find a wife. Ella manages to attend thanks to the 11th hour intervention of a fairy godmother. In one of Beane’s more ingenious turns, said godmother remains uncredited in the program, and to do so here would involve a major plot spoiler.
When the spells wear off at midnight, Ella flees, eventually catalyzing a kingdom-wide search for the foot that can fit the singular, translucent shoe.
Beane’s book keeps the framework of the story, but he adds characters that both enliven and enrich the tale. Among them is Jean Michele (Christopher Llewyn Ramirez), a student revolutionary trying to get the Prince’s attention about illegal annexations.
Then there are the stepsisters. In Beane’s telling, they aren’t wicked so much as badly raised. And in another plot twist, one of them becomes a double agent, teaming up with Ella in true sisterhood. There’s also Marie (a witchy, eagle-eyed McKinley Carter), deemed “crazy” by the townsfolk.
Mak’s decades-deep experience as a dancer and a choreographer is on full, glorious display throughout “Cinderella.” The prince has not one but two grand evenings of dance, and each is a jewel-toned (rich, tailored gowns by costume designer Theresa Ham) pageant of jaw-dropping beauty and swirling majesty.
With “The Prince Is Giving a Ball,” Mak fills the stage with a raucous jamboree of villagers, royals and speechifiers, turning the proclamation into a giddy street party. As Lord Pinkleton, Ryan Michael Hamman leads the official announcements with deadpan ridiculousness and scene-stealing aplomb. He delivers more comedy in the slight curl of a lip or the arch of an eyebrow than many manage in a thousand pratfalls.
In Ella and the Prince, the production has a flawed, funny, love duo whose archetypal love story will resonate with anyone who’s been in love. Or felt unappreciated, overwhelmed or without agency. Or been incensed with any of the governing bodies impacting their lives.
Alas, Kringer’s bewildered Topher is not excited for the forthcoming ball. With the aptly named “Me, Who Am I?” Kringer sends out a ballad of self-doubt and searching ambition.
As Ella, deGuzman commands the stage from the start. She tells an epic, bell-clear series of micro-adventures in “In My Own Little Corner,” a song that manages to be a testimony to imagination and sobering acceptance of reality at once.
When she and Topher first meet in the town square, their meet-cute, brief interaction seems electric enough to flicker the hundreds of chandeliers at the Drury Lane complex.
The transformation of pumpkins into coaches and forest creatures into footman and horses is another stunning moment, a superb interplay of Ham’s illusionary costumes, Jesse Mooney-Bullock’s adorable, hilarious puppets, Jose Santiago’s lighting design and Riw Rakkulchon’s set design. Ella’s fairy godmother transforms her from her dirt-lined cleaning clothes into couture ball gown not once but twice, and every time it’s a gasp-out-loud moment.
No fairy tale would be complete without an arch villain, and “Cinderella” has an exquisitely dastardly one in Jeff Parker, who schemes and patronizes with vicious superiority as Sebastian, Topher’s top advisor. Parker makes a fine royal nemesis.
“Cinderella” gives us a prince and princess with governance on their minds as well as romance.
