Diana: The Musical review - a right royal debacle so bad you'll hyperventilate

[Nevilledog]

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Talia Bracha Lavin
@chick_in_kiev
i am now watching the diana musical on netflix and its one of the worst things ive ever seen. this interview is accurate. diana just sang about regretting marrying a scorpio

Diana: The Musical review – a right royal debacle so bad you’ll hyperventilate
This filmed version of the Broadway show, with its accidental comedy and cringeworthy lines, is a guilty-pleasures singalong in waiting
theguardian.com
4:54 PM · Oct 10, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/oct/01/diana-the-musical-review-broadway-show-netflix

And … now … it’s … springtime for glamour and victimhood, winter for Windsors and Charles. Netflix have now given us the filmed version of the entirely gobsmacking and jawdropping Broadway show Diana: The Musical, shot at the Longacre theatre on West 48th Street last summer with no audience while the show itself was on pause due to the Covid pandemic. And while you’re waiting for Pablo Larraín’s movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as Diana, this will have to do. Although there is a danger it will cause you to hyperventilate.

Not since the Cats movie have I literally shouted from my seat: “What? What? WHAT?” Only by having Diana ride on stage on the back of a Jellicle cat could this be more bizarre. If it was deliberate satire it would be genius, but it’s not. It’s a saucer-eyed retelling of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, with bobbing chorus lines of footmen and flunkies who with a costume change morph into step-in-time phalanxes of snarling tabloid hacks, while Diana solemnly warbles downstage about her loneliness and determination in a pool of follow spotlight.

The director is Christopher Ashley of the La Jolla Playhouse, and the (bizarre) book, music and lyrics are by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan and Joe DiPietro, famed for the hit show Memphis. Diana is played by British-born musical theatre star Jeanna de Waal, who looks eerily like Tina Brown channelling Victoria Wood. Erin Davies is Camilla Parker Bowles; Roe Hartrampf is pompous Charles and Broadway veteran Judy Kaye has a double role as the Queen and also Diana’s step-grandmother, the chiffon-clad romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, the one character who does at least supply a bit of intentional comedy.

Aside from Mel Brooks’s classic fictional stage creation about the Third Reich, the imaginary musical that this most resembles is the sub-Lloyd Webber extravaganza Elephant!, about the Elephant Man, in Richard Curtis’s comedy The Tall Guy, with its quirky chorus line of elephants and their perky trunks. It’s another study of terrible loneliness. We begin with single girl Diana bemused by Charles’s interest in her and confiding in her older sister Sarah, who has herself dated the Prince of Wales. She tells Diana that she would be a good match for Charles: “Against all odds, you’re still a virgin!”

*snip*

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Bad Art is big.

Baby Atlas



MOBA

http://museumofbadart.org/

[tavernier]

2. Agree.

I lasted about twelve minutes. Hideous mess.

[mnhtnbb]

3. I didn't even make it five minutes!

Turned it off before the opening song was finished.

[Celerity]

4. If it's worse than Cats, then it's a nuclear-powered level of shitbaggery

[Ms. Toad]

5. I think I got through one song.

Or maybe not quite.

[MustLoveBeagles]

6. Now I'm curious

[Hekate]

7. The LA Times reviewer panned it, but this review is absolutely fabulous, if only for ...

… “What? What? WHAT?”

[misanthrope]

8. Fascination or concern with the British monarchy escapes me

I don't understand the draw.

[Retrograde]

9. "Bad" would be a compliment

The lyrics don't even get up to "puerile". Yeah, I watched it, but I was doing some mending and wanted a no-brainer to listen to. And it wasn't even that good.

The actor playing Camilla isn't bad, though.