Bungling Britney

A fairy-tale remix full of hits-yet it doesn't leave a mark.

- By Jackson McHenry

There's a newish formula to get your show to Broadway, though not necessarily to make it good: Take a well-used plot, add a vaguely feminist twist, and set it to all-too-familiar pop music or approximations thereof. From those basic precepts, this past season we've had & Juliet (based on Shakespeare; featuring the songs of Max Martin) and Bad Cinderella (featuring the noodling of Andrew Lloyd Webber), and now, somewhere in the shaded area of their Venn diagram, Once Upon a One More Time, which is based on "Cinderella" and other fairy tales and features the Britney Spears catalogue, which includes a lot of Max Martin. If you run fast enough across Times Square, you might be able to see two Broadway takes on "Oops!... I Did It Again" in one evening. Given that Once Upon a One More Time follows those shows in this mini-genre (not to mention their sparkly, belty, much better fairy godmother, Six), you would have reason to hope that it improves upon the tropes. Instead, it's reductive and pandering, hitting all the expected marks without any unique spark.