Cinderella's fairy-tale revival
Whitney Houston's TV movie dream finally comes true

Date: October 31, 1997
By Matt Roush

From USA Today
Submitted by: Larry A.


Impossible things keep happening every day.

Truer words were never sung than this rousing Rodgers & Hammerstein refrain between a yearning Cinderella and her fabulous floating siren of a fairy godmother.

Four years in the remaking of a musical TV classic, Sunday's multi-cultural and mega-budget all-star version of Cinderella on ABC's Wonderful World of Disney (7 p.m. ET/PT) at times seemed an impossible dream.

"After awhile, man, I started thinking, 'Do they believe in this?' This was my fantasy," says Whitney Houston, who doubles as the sassy Fairy Godmother and an executive producer. She originally planned to play the title role, but as her hectic schedule intervened and the project languished at CBS while she became a mother, she eventually decided she had grown beyond the innocence required to play Cinderella.

So she made a call to her 18-year-old protege, Brandy, a popular R&B ingenue and star of UPN's Moesha. "She has an innocence as well as an energy, and her eyes speak of wonder," Houston says. "And we already had that godmother-to-goddaughter thing going, a real give-and-take, so it was like a natural evolution to bring that to the screen."

Brandy was thunderstruck. "I was a total fool when she called me. I dropped the phone and left her on hold I don't know how long. I was so shocked. I was in awe. I begged my mom, 'Please don't worry about the contracts, let me do the movie.' And she let me do the movie. I was so happy."

Brandy's career has its own Cinderella aspects, but this is ridiculous. "My dreams have been coming true since I was 15: my own TV show, a successful album. This role is a whole reality thing for me, except I didn't have a mean family."

For those with the project from the start, much was at stake. Houston cites her 4-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina, as the inspiration to persevere with the project. "I look at my daughter, and she looks at this picture and she's in a dream world. Her eyes are sparkling, her imagination is going, her dreams are moving. That's what it's all about."

Debra Martin Chase, Houston's partner in BrownHouse Productions, says the colorblind casting was always part of the vision. Cinderella is black, her prince (Paolo Montalban, a discovery from the chorus of Broadway's The King & I) is Filipino. The queen (Whoopi Goldberg) is black, the king (Victor Garber) is white. The wicked stepmother (Bernadette Peters) is white, her shrill daughters black (Natalie Desselle) and white (Veanne Cox).

"What better way to send a message to all children that everything is possible? I can't tell you what it would have meant to me to see a black Cinderella," says Chase, who's among the generation that watched the annual replays of the 1965 Cinderella on CBS, starring Lesley Ann Warren. (CBS' original 1957 telecast with Julie Andrews, seen by an astonishing 107 million viewers, aired live and was never shown again.)

Executive producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who scored big in 1993 with Bette Midler's Gypsy on CBS, expect this to further their mission of preserving the old-fashioned musical on film. "Each time you do a musical, it's like the first time you've done anything in this genre," Meron says. "People ask, 'But will they watch a musical?' When we did Gypsy, they came in droves. We feel the same about Cinderella."

The producers had to defy conventional wisdom. "In four years, not a single agent or person in Hollywood gave us the slightest help or encouragement," Zadan says. "They said it'll never happen, don't bother, you're wasting your time. The more they discouraged, they more we went, 'No! We're going to do this, Whitney is going to do this.' And sure enough, hanging in there, it all came together." But at a hefty cost.

At $ 12 million, this ornate and special effects-laden production is three to four times the industry norm for TV movies. "The whole look and size of the production reflects that in this day and age, 'event' programming is the trend," Meron says.

Disney, which owns ABC and has a lucrative video distribution arm, stepped up with financing after CBS finally passed. "We obviously think the material is worth it," says Charles Hirschhorn, president of Walt Disney TV.

Zadan says the resurgence of Disney's animated musicals influenced the production. "We wondered what would it be like if we created a world like the animated musical, only with real people. The saturation of color is so intense, the sets so elaborate, by doing that it would be OK for everybody to sing. And by having such a sumptuous palette of color on the screen, the color of people's skin would disappear."

While the price tag is high, Zadan says, most of it went for sets, costumes, special effects and music recording costs. "We had to ask this wonderful cast to do it for nothing. Whitney set the standard by saying she would work for peanuts. It was such a team effort."

Bernadette Peters, a Broadway veteran who played a witch in Stephen Sondheim's fairy-tale pastiche Into the Woods, signed on because "the whole production was putting a new stamp on the piece, by being multicultural taking it to another level. Besides, it's a yummy thing to do. In fairy tales, you get the opportunity to do something really outrageous if it fits the scene. You can draw in Crayola instead of charcoal."

Musical theater buffs will notice changes from the original. The role of a bumbling courtier was created for Seinfeld's Jason Alexander. Three songs from the Richard Rodgers catalog have been inserted: The Sweetest Sounds to introduce Cinderella and the Prince, a climactic anthem for Houston (the obscure There's Music in You, from the movie Main Street to Broadway) and a Rodgers & Hart tune (Falling in Love With Love) reconceived as a rowdy show-stopper for Peters.

Houston looks forward to introducing this material to her and Brandy's fans, "who see us only as pop and R&B princesses, locked into pop or rock or MTV. We've got a lot more than that to give, man."

If this expensive gamble pays off in the ratings, Disney has promised the producers to make a musical every season. "I'm already convinced," Hirschhorn says. "There's lots of great material out there and extraordinary musical theater talent. The fact it's on TV seems to make no difference."

Houston figures having it on TV is a plus. "The goal was for all children to be able to see it, even if they don't have cable or can't make it to the theaters." Even so, she says she's "fighting with Disney" to put the movie in theaters for Christmas. "There's nothing like it on the big screen, either."