Depending on your taste and point of view, Disney either rescued the modern musical or ruined it. Certainly, they Disneyfied it. From the moment the entertainment conglomerate decided to adapt one of their animated features into a stage musical – with Beauty and the Beast in 1994, followed three years later by The Lion King – audience expectations around the form altered. Sets and costumes needed to be lavish, songs needed to be recognisable and, by the time the curtain came down, schmaltz should win the day.
Musicals that have become major hits since have done so by leaning away from the Disney formula towards smaller-scale, single-set productions, using idiosyncratic music and a serious approach to storytelling to differentiate themselves. Come from Away, Hadestown and even Hamilton are all essentially chamber pieces, whose musical expression comes from outside the musical theatre canon.
The Australian producers behind new musical Midnight have done the opposite. They’ve taken Disney on at their own game, with a family-friendly original adaptation of the Cinderella story that largely apes musicals of the past. The production design (sets by James Browne, lighting by Trudy Dalgleish, costumes by Harriet Oxley) feels cobbled from previous, more expensive productions. The score is hopelessly imitative. It proves a foolhardy approach.
It isn’t as if the world was crying out for a Cinderella musical. Australia had a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella only last year, and Sondheim transformed the character into a portrait of ambivalence and ingenuity way back in 1987 with Into the Woods. That iteration had the character marry her prince only to discover he’s a selfish philanderer. This version has a similarly unimpressed young woman, Ella (Brianna Bishop), who thinks her prince (Thomas McGuane) is a useless waste of space even before she meets him.
Book writers Dean Murphy and Pip Mushin (who also direct) introduce new elements to the fairytale – a child narrator framing the story, a talking bear – without carving out a coherent alternate reading of the material. Ella rails against the king’s taxes and the prince’s ineptitude without directly calling for rebellion; for a while it seems republican sentiment might threaten the monarchist status quo, but it never does. A streak of feminism is hinted at, but most of the women are gendered cliches and the protagonist inevitably ends up with her man.
The show’s biggest flaw, though, is an interminable first act (with an hour and a half running time) that withholds Cinderella’s physical transformation entirely. The fairy godmother doesn’t even show up until after the interval. This leaves a second act stuffed with action – the ballgowns and slippers, the search for the lost love, all that giddy class ambition lying just under the surface of the story – that has no time to breathe or settle.
None of John Foreman and Anthony Costanzo’s songs help much, arresting the narrative at every turn. The music is so derivative of the Disney playbook that Alan Menken should by rights be receiving royalties, but there are also strong traces of Lionel Bart, Stephen Schwartz and Lucy Simon. The lyrics are just bad, like something a chatbot would invent. They either directly conjure famous material – seriously, how can you repeat the refrain “why can’t I?” without expecting the audience to think of Somewhere Over the Rainbow? – or they reduce to banality and doggerel. Words like “believe”, “hope” and “feeling” keep repeating, utterly divorced from meaning.
It is all such a shame, when the stage is heaving with talent and the cast give their all to every number. Bishop is terrific, likeable and headstrong, with a serious set of pipes she uses to elevate her solos. Verity Hunt-Ballard is delicious as the wicked stepmother who initially presents as kindhearted, with a pantomime switch she relishes. Shane Jacobson is boisterous and bellicose and then sincere and loving as the profligate king. Lucy Durack is delightfully dotty as the fairy godmother, even if she’s criminally underused throughout. Lyall Brooks works so hard in a variety of roles he feels like the show’s engine. The ensemble is first-rate, smashing out Kelly Aykers’ sharp, inventive choreography and nailing every musical phrase.
Midnight is well-staged and bursting with vitality, but it has almost no sense of purpose, no genuine cultural distinction. It is on one hand massively ambitious – a huge running time, a plethora of musical influences, and orchestrations so maximalist they wouldn’t seem out of place at a royal gala – but in all the essential ways it is narrow, shallow and conservative. For an Australian retelling of a largely Eurocentric story, it draws so much of its artistic perspective from America. Not just America, but the slick schmaltz-land of Disney’s America. Australia’s musical theatre renaissance does not this way lie.
Midnight is on at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne until 18 July
