'Bad Cinderella' Is So Bad It's Leaving Broadway After Three Months

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | May 11, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | May 11, 2023 |

Honestly, with a title like that, it was just asking for trouble. Bad Cinderella, the latest musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber, is leaving Broadway after only three months. Ouch. The producers announced that the show will have its final performance at the Imperial Theatre on June 4. By that point, it will have played 33 preview performances and 85 regular performances. It received zero Tony nominations. Nobody is surprised.

Bad Cinderella had a rough go from the beginning. Originally titled Cinderella, the show was positioned as the great hope of the West End during the COVID-19 lockdown. Lord Lloyd Webber made a big deal about how he would put himself on the front line and risk arrest to keep the show open, all in the name of saving theatre. The London production even received strong reviews from British critics, who heralded its fun feminist-adjacent retelling of the classic fairy tale. It ran for a year on the West End, plagued by pandemic-related issues, until he decided to close the show. Then things got messy. The cast and crew found out about its closing via the press and social media. On closing night, Lloyd Webber sent a statement in lieu of appearing himself, and its reading received boos from the audience.

A big deal was made about how he would take the show to Broadway, where he gave it a snarky new name and retooled it to be a funky fresh rebel show that nobody in New York liked. The critics were far more dismissive of the Broadway version, with everyone taking swings at the name because dude, you just set yourself up for that. Variety said it was ‘a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairy tale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot.’ The New York Times said it was ‘surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down.’ Time Out declared it to be ‘only half-bad, but its virtues are in all the wrong places.’

The impending closure of Bad Cinderella means that this is the first time in 43 years that there won’t be an Andrew Lloyd Webber show running on Broadway. The Phantom of the Opera closed in April, so I’m not saying that Bad Cinderella might have been cursed by a mask-wearing incel mad that he was kicked out of his flashy pad, but I’m not not saying it.

Lloyd Webber was one of twelve composers asked to write a new piece for the coronation of Charles III and Camilla, so he’s keeping busy. Still, I think if he just brought Phantom back, it’d fix a lot of the world’s problems. That or we get Cats 2.