Bad Cinderella: What Went Wrong Between London and Broadway?

They Changed Cinderella. Why Didn’t Broadway Believe the New Version?

When Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella crossed the Atlantic, Broadway did not receive the London production unchanged. It arrived with a new title — Bad Cinderella — a new leading actress, revisions to the book, a new cast, and a production being repositioned for an American audience. The Broadway version began previews at the Imperial Theatre on February 17, 2023, and officially opened March 23.

By June 4, it was gone. 33 previews. 85 regular performances. The Broadway production earned no Tony nominations. Its recorded Broadway gross across previews and regular performances was about $8.1 million, with an average reported capacity of roughly 78%.

But Bad Cinderella raises a production question more interesting than whether critics liked it: when a troubled production transfers to another market, how much can you change before you are no longer fixing the original show—but building a second version on top of it?

The Broadway Production Had Already Lived Another Life

Linedy Genao as Cinderella lifted by the ensemble in the Broadway production of Bad Cinderella

Bad Cinderella did not begin in New York. Its earlier incarnation, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, premiered in London’s West End in 2021 after a development period disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Broadway version was explicitly described as reworked from that London production. Laurence Connor remained director, but the American production introduced a new company headed by Linedy Genao and arrived under the sharper title Bad Cinderella. The basic creative DNA remained formidable: Andrew Lloyd Webber (music), David Zippel (lyrics), Emerald Fennell (original book), Laurence Connor (direction), JoAnn M. Hunter (choreography), Gabriela Tylesova (scenic and costume design), Bruno Poet (lighting) and Gareth Owen (sound). For Broadway, however, the book was adapted by playwright Alexis Scheer.

That distinction matters. This was not simply a touring production changing theatres. It was a creative transfer.

A Transfer Is Really a Second Opening Night

In production management, the word “transfer” sounds deceptively simple. Move the scenery. Recast where necessary. Adapt the technical drawings. Load into the new theatre. Rehearse. Open. But transferring a musical from the West End to Broadway creates another problem: the audience changes, the media environment changes, critical expectations change, marketing changes, the building changes, the cast’s chemistry changes. And once significant rewriting begins, even the dramatic rhythm may change.

The production must decide what belongs to the identity of the original and what belongs only to its first incarnation. That is much harder than rebuilding scenery.

The Title Became Part of the Rewrite

The London production was called Cinderella. The Broadway production became Bad Cinderella. That one word performs enormous marketing work. “Bad” promises rebellion. It suggests that this Cinderella will reject the traditional fairy-tale machinery rather than simply participate in it. The show was billed as an unconventional fairy tale set in the exceptionally beautiful kingdom of Belleville, built around a heroine explicitly framed not as a damsel in distress.

That creates an audience contract before the curtain rises. The title tells us: this Cinderella is different. The production therefore has to keep proving that difference — not just through costume, not just through attitude, not just through jokes, but through dramatic choices.

Belleville Was Designed to Look Too Beautiful

This is where Gabriela Tylesova’s scenic and costume design becomes important. Belleville is not merely a pretty fairy-tale kingdom. Its obsession with physical perfection is part of the story. The beautiful bodies, extravagant costumes and heightened environment therefore have a dramatic function: they create the culture Cinderella is supposedly resisting.

That is good production logic — theme, then world, then scenic language, then costume language. But there is a trap. Satire depends on distance. If an audience is meant to question a world obsessed with beauty while the production simultaneously gives enormous theatrical pleasure to that same beauty, the design has to communicate the contradiction precisely. Otherwise spectacle can overpower critique. The audience may enjoy Belleville more than it questions Belleville. That is not necessarily a design failure. It is a creative-direction problem requiring every department to agree on what the visual excess means.

Then Cinderella Gets the Makeover

Linedy Genao as Cinderella during the transformation sequence in Bad Cinderella on Broadway

This is where several critics identified a fundamental contradiction. The musical positions Cinderella against Belleville’s fixation on beauty, yet the familiar Cinderella transformation remains part of the theatrical machinery. The Washington Post criticized the production for attacking society’s obsession with appearance while still participating in that logic; Broadway News similarly focused on the makeover and the tension between the show’s stated ideas and what happens to Cinderella.

This matters far beyond Bad Cinderella. A musical communicates through more than dialogue. If the book says beauty shouldn’t determine your value, but costume, lighting, choreography and staging tell the audience to marvel at how much more spectacular she becomes after transformation, the production is sending two messages simultaneously. The audience does not separate departments. It experiences one show.

Production Design Can Accidentally Argue Against the Script

This is one of theatre’s most fascinating problems. A scenic designer can execute the brief beautifully. A costume designer can produce extraordinary work. Lighting can reveal it perfectly. Choreography can animate it. Sound can make the sequence explode. Every department can succeed individually — while the combined production communicates something the story did not intend.

That is why Creative Direction is not simply the process of approving attractive designs. It is the process of asking what the audience concludes when all these designs operate together. The answer may be different from what the script says.

The Reviews Kept Returning to Coherence

Critical reaction was not identical, and describing it simply as universal rejection would be inaccurate. But multiple reviews questioned the show’s tonal or thematic coherence. Entertainment Weekly described tensions between the show’s themes, characterization and visual spectacle, while The Guardian called the Broadway result chaotic and noted that the production had been substantially reworked after its London history.

That word — coherence — matters, because coherence is not a department. You cannot assign it to scenery, or lighting, or choreography, or sound, or even exclusively to the book. Coherence exists between departments. It is what happens when the audience understands why everything onstage belongs to the same idea.

The Numbers Started Telling Their Own Story

Empty red seats and balconies inside Broadway’s Imperial Theatre

Bad Cinderella opened March 23 and closed June 4, playing 33 previews and 85 performances. Its reported Broadway grosses totaled approximately $8.1 million, with an average ticket price of about $65.79 and average capacity of about 78% across the run. Individual weeks toward the end became particularly difficult: the week ending April 25, for instance, brought in only about $539,000 at a 1,400-seat house.

Those figures do not explain why the production failed to sustain a Broadway run. Box-office data cannot diagnose a script. But it does show that the problem eventually became operational. Once revenue cannot support the continuing cost structure, artistic debate becomes a production-management decision.

Then Came the Tony Nominations

On May 2, 2023, the Tony Award nominations were announced. Bad Cinderella received none — not even for featured performers Carolee Carmello or Grace McLean, considered its best hopes for a nod. Eight days later, on May 10, the production announced it would close June 4, becoming, as Playbill noted, the season’s second Tony-nomination “casualty” after Bob Fosse’s Dancin’.

Correlation should not be exaggerated into a single cause. A Broadway closing decision involves economics, advance sales, operating costs, investor calculations and expectations extending beyond awards. But Tony recognition can affect a new musical’s visibility and marketing narrative. Bad Cinderella no longer had that possible boost. Its runway was disappearing.

And Something Much Larger Ended With It

The closing carried an extraordinary historical footnote. Since September 1979, an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical had been performing on Broadway every single playing night — a 43-year streak that Bad Cinderella itself had been announced specifically to extend. When it closed, Broadway was left without an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running for the first time in more than four decades.

That statistic could easily become the entire story. It shouldn’t. Because the more useful production lesson lies inside the transfer itself. Lloyd Webber’s history could bring enormous attention to the production. It could not solve the fundamental question of adaptation: what exactly needed to survive from London — and what needed to be rebuilt?

Don’t Ask What to Change. Ask What Cannot Change.

When a troubled production enters redevelopment, the natural response is to make a list: rewrite this scene, replace that performer, cut this song, change the title, redesign the marketing, move that sequence, add comedy, clarify the ending. But enough isolated corrections can create another problem — the production loses its center.

A better redevelopment process begins with a different question: what is the one experience the audience absolutely must leave understanding? For Bad Cinderella, possible answers might have involved rebellion, beauty, identity, romantic autonomy or the absurdity of perfection. But whichever answer is selected, every department must be able to test its choices against it — book, music, lyrics, performance, scenery, costume, lighting, choreography, marketing, even the title. If each department is fixing a different version of the problem, revision becomes accumulation rather than clarification.

A Transfer Needs a Redesign Matrix

Before transferring a large production, IMMERSIVE LAB would divide every major element into four categories: KEEP (essential to the identity), REBUILD (strong idea, wrong execution), REMOVE (no longer serving the central experience), and PROTECT (something revision must not accidentally destroy).

The fourth category may be the most important. Productions are often good at identifying problems. They are less disciplined about identifying what already works. A rewrite can solve one weakness while destroying a strength. A new visual concept can clarify one theme while contradicting another. A stronger marketing proposition can create expectations the actual production cannot fulfill. A transfer therefore needs more than improvement. It needs change control.

Bad Cinderella Wasn’t Just a Bad Review Story

Calling Bad Cinderella a flop is easy. Calling it a bad musical is an opinion. Neither tells a production team very much. Its more useful legacy is as a case study in adaptation architecture. A production crossed an ocean carrying an existing score, an established concept, a director who knew the previous version, a recognizable composer, a familiar fairy tale, and knowledge gained from an earlier commercial run. Then it changed. And changed again.

Yet Broadway audiences still needed to encounter the production as though none of that history existed. They only saw the version in front of them. That is the brutal truth of redevelopment: the audience does not give credit for how much work it took to fix the previous version. It only experiences the current one.

Editor’s Take

Bad Cinderella leaves behind a lesson more valuable than its 85-performance run. Revision is not the same as redesign. Revision asks what can be changed; redesign first decides what the production is trying to become. When a show moves between markets, the danger is not changing too little — it is changing many things without establishing one governing idea powerful enough to align book, performance, scenery, costume, choreography and marketing. The most important document in a transfer may therefore not be the new script or technical rider. It may be a single page defining what the audience must understand when the curtain falls.