Is This Your Jelly Shoe?

It is a bit of a cheat to include this film in among all the productions for the Disney PrincessesReleased in 1937, Disney's Snow White was a gamble for the company: the first fully-animated, feature-length film ever created. It's success lead to the eventual creation of the Disney Princess franchise, which has spawned 13 main-line films and multiple spin-off movies and shows.. Yes, it’s a version of Cinderella, and it’s one that was made by Disney. Despite the involvement of the House of Mouse, and it airing at one point as part of The Wonderful World of Disney, this isn’t a version of the Disney Cinderella. This is a production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein theatrical play, Cinderella, made into a TV movie, and that makes it a strange fit in the Disney oeuvre.

It’s not that Disney has avoided theatrical productions before. Usually, though, like in the case of The Little Mermaid or Frozen, there’s productions based on their own versions. If Disney were to do a live action Cinderella (setting aside the actual version from 2015 they really did make), you’d expect it to be a variation of the 1950 film, and not some other production that would make everyone quite confused. This is still a musical, it’s still Cinderella, but it’s not the version (with all the songs and characters that everyone knows) most would expect from Disney. It’s something… weirder.

I’m sure there are theater kids out there that are mad at me for saying that, but it’s true. It’s weird for Disney to do this version when they could have done a theatrical version of their own production. I would argue we didn’t need a Rodgers and Hammerstein production, especially not this one with its strange, very 1990s special effects as well as its very 1990s cast and performers as well. That doesn’t make this a bad film… at least if you like Rodgers and Hammerstein, I guess. But it is an odd choice for everyone involved.

It’s still Cinderella, though, so you know the basics of the story. Cindy (Brandy Norwood) is the stepdaughter of the Wicked Stepmother (literally given no name of her own here, but played deliciously by Bernadette Peters). She was orphaned as a small girl when her father died, leaving her in the care of her stepmother, who then treated her like a servant, emotionally abusing the girl while making her do all the housework while she, the stepmother, and her two other daughters (Veanne Cox as Calliope and Natalie Desselle as Minerva), lounge around all day, shopping, eating, and being spoiled brats.

While on a shopping excursion for her stepfamily, Cindy runs into Christopher (Paolo Montalban), seemingly another peasant but who is, in fact, the Prince. They have a meet-cute before he runs off, and she’s left dreaming of finding someone like him. As it turns out, though, his parents (Victor Garber as King Maximillian and Whoopi Goldberg as Queen Constantina) want him to settle down. So they force him to hold a ball for all the eligible women in the city. Despite her stepmother trying to keep Cindy away, Cindy’s fairy godmother (played by Whitney Houston) intercedes and magically is able to send Cindy to the ball. There she sees the Prince and the two dance and fall in love. But Cindy has to flee at the stroke of midnight, leaving her glass slipper behind, and that leaves the Prince searching for the one woman who could possibly fit that shoe…

Say what you will about the Disney Cinderella (and I have), there’s no denying it’s iconic. It has catchy songs backing well produced animation, all packed together in a then cutting edge format. The fact that it’s at all watchable even now is a testament to how well Disney put together that film. It’ll stay largely timeless (even if I don’t much like it personally) decades from now. The same cannot be said for the 1997 Cinderella, which feels tired, stodgy, and also very, very stuck in the 1990s.

The first issue is the music. I am not a theater kid so I’m not going to get into the finer points of musical theater, but I will say that the songs in this production are, by and large, book numbers and not breakaway hits. For the most part they fall under the “wasting five minutes on music for something that could have been handled in ten seconds of dialogue,” and almost never is that a good thing in this film. It does improve over time, and songs like "Stepsister's Lament" (sung by the stepsisters as they as they watch Cindy, who they don’t recognize, dance with the Prince) or "A Lovely Night" (sung by Cindy and her stepfamily) actually do well to convey emotion as well as character development. These numbers, though, are few and far between.

It’s not a matter of the talent in front of the cameras, mind you. Although the casting is a tad unusual (with an eye towards the best actors, one assumes, regardless of their race even in context of the part their playing and the relationships the characters should have, like the king being White, the queen being Black, and the prince being Latino) they are all great performers. What works on screen is absolutely because they have good actors and singers in these roles. But the music itself, no matter how much the singers belt the songs out, just doesn’t work. It’s also so boring and unengaging.

There are moments that do work, mind you, but those are generally when the film stops singing everything at us and lets the characters talk and react to each other. A moment between the Queen and the Prince early on, when she’s plotting his ball is quite amusing. Then there’s the opening of the ball itself, as the Prince is going through a very choreographed and telegraphed courtly dance, and is bored of every minute of it, that’s absolutely hysterical. I wish there were more moments like this in the film because they would do a lot to help make this an interesting piece when it’s, otherwise, very much not.

It also feels pretty old at this point. It’s been nearly thirty years since the film was produced and it very much feels like a product of its era. Having Brandy in the lead, and Whitney Houston as her Fairy Godmother certainly puts a specific date on this work. Brandy hasn’t completely disappeared, but she was certainly at the height of her career in the late 1990s and early 2000s when she was the lead on Moesha and also had a major role in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Jason Alexander (as the Prince’s aide) also was at his most popular during that era. Whoopi Goldberg was a major movie star then. And when you couple all of that with very cheesy special effects that likely looked dated even in 1997, it all really feels so specific to its own era and like it wouldn’t work anywhere else. Certainly it doesn’t work now.

I didn’t go in wanting to hate this version of Cinderella. It’s fine enough as a bit of musical theater, I suppose, but I think you really have to like this kind of production to even be able to give it a chance. Musicals are not normally my thing, even under the best of circumstances, and a version like this, cheesy and stodgy as it is, didn’t have a chance to hook me. It’s fine if this is your cup of tea… I just don’t know how many fans of this work (or any version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella) there could be. This Cindy kind of sucks.