“Once Upon a One More Time,” a musical comedy featuring 23 songs from Britney Spears’s catalogue, will start in Chicago later this year.
The show will use the singer’s back catalogue to populate a story based around a book club made up of fairytale princesses. It is scheduled to have production later this year in Chicago and then seeks to transfer to Broadway theatre in New York city for premiere in 2020.
The theatre owner James L. Nederlander announced on Tuesday that he is producing a new musical featuring the song catalogue of Spears, one of the best-selling pop artists of all time, that explores an alternative arc for some classic fairy tale princesses.
“I’m so excited to have a musical with my songs – especially one that takes place in such a magical world filled with characters that I grew up on, who I love and adore,” said Spears.
“This is a dream come true for me!”
Unlike many jukebox musicals, this show will not be about Spears’s life (which has not been a fairy tale), but instead will offer a revisionist look at some legendary characters.
In the show, a fortnightly book club whose members include Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, is working its way through a collection of the Grimms’ fairy tales, the only book they have. But when the women wish for new reading material, a fairy godmother brings them Ms Friedan’s feminist classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” and their lives are altered in unexpected ways.
“Cinderella is having an existential crisis, and she has a posse of famous princesses, and her stepmother is the main antagonist, and there’s also Prince Charming and a dwarf we’ve never met, the eighth dwarf, and a narrator who is unhappy his system is being dismantled before his eyes,” said the bookwriter, Jon Hartmere,
The director will be Kristin Hanggi and the choreographers Keone & Mari Madrid.
“The project has already had several readings, one of them attended by Spears, and will have a developmental workshop next month,” Hartmere said.rit
The show is scheduled to start previews October 29, to open November 13, and to run until December 1 at the James M. Nederlander Theater in Chicago.
