It’s safe to say, 2020 has been quite the opposite of a fairy tale. Nevertheless, Andrew, Emerald Fennell, David Zippel, and the Cinderella creative team have been working relentlessly to ensure that Spring 2021 will be the perfect fit for the highly anticipated new musical.
Here's a quick glance at everything they have been up to over the past few months in lockdown!
In addition to the supercut above, Andrew recently interviewed with The Sunday Times Music Editor, Dan Cairns, to discuss the inception of Cinderella and how the creative process has adjusted to fit the extraordinary circumstances over the last few months.
“I sensed in mid-February how serious this was going to be. I heard from very reliable medical sources that it was grim. We called an emergency meeting and said, ‘We’ve got to be prepared for the fact that the theatres are going to close and Cinderella is not going to get on.’ “From there we adapted to these changed circumstances. We had to cancel the workshops, so we instigated weekly Zoom meetings and sing-throughs with Carrie Hope Fletcher [Cinderella] and co."
Andrew later went on to acknowledge the conversation that inspired him to write the show: “Everyone was going on about the Super Bowl, and I said, ‘Hang on — I think you might find that the broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella in 1957 would be right up there.’ You could sense them thinking, ‘God, what’s musical theatre got to do with this?’ But then somebody googled it and said: ‘Holy shit, he’s right.’ It got more than 100 million viewers, which was a huge proportion of Americans at the time. And then some bright spark said, ‘Well, Andrew, maybe you should do a new Cinderella.’ ”To conclude, Dan Cairns revealed: “The three songs I hear from the musical, which has a radically reangled book by the actress and writer Emerald Fennell (The Crown, Killing Eve), are brutally good — cut-to-the-chase show stoppers by a composer who could, by now, probably do this in his sleep (detractors will no doubt have a pithy rejoinder to that).”
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella world premieres at The Gillian Lynne Theatre in London on Wednesday 7 April 2021, with previews from Friday 19 March 2021. Tickets on sale now.
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