Belle Of The Ball

Date: November 02, 1997
By Claire Bickley

From The Toronto Sun
Submitted by: Larry A.


And so, the beautiful white girl grew up, married the handsome white prince and they lived happily ever after in their creamy white world.

Or so the story went.

Tonight, Cinderella gets not only a TV revival but also a major makeover, literally changing the complexion of the classic fairy-tale.

Its multiracial cast includes R&B recording artist Brandy Norwood as Cinderella, Bernadette Peters as her wicked stepmother, Whitney Houston as the fairy godmother, Whoopi Goldberg as the queen, Victor Garber as the king and Paolo Montalban as Prince Charming.

"We hope that this Cinderella, as we approach the millennium, is reflective of what our society is today," says executive producer Debra Martin Chase, vice-president of Houston's production company.

"Both Whitney and I, as kids, watched musicals on TV. We watched The Wizard Of Oz every year and Peter Pan and Cinderella and were enthralled by them. It's only as we got older that we realized the impact of having only white images in these fairy-tales, and what they meant to us and other kids subliminally."

It was four years ago, after seeing their TV version of Gypsy starring Bette Midler, that Houston approached executive producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron and asked them to do a small screen musical with her. Scheduling conflicts delayed production past the point where Houston felt she was young enough to take the title role herself and so she turned to Norwood.

"She called me, for real," Norwood, 18, says breathily.

"She said, 'You gotta play this part in the movie I'm about to do.' I was like, 'Really? What do I play?' She said, 'You play Cinderella.' And I dropped the phone and I ran out of the room screaming to my mom."

The star of the United Paramount Network sitcom Moesha since she was 16, Norwood has sung on the soundtracks of Waiting To Exhale and Set It Off, been nominated for five Grammy Awards and saw her debut album go platinum, so reprising the songs Julie Andrews sang in the 1947 Rodgers & Hammerstein live TV original and by Lesley Ann Warren in the TV classic eight years later wasn't intimidating.

"My best friends my age think I'm singing opera but they do think it's beautiful," she says. Learning classical dance came a little less naturally. "There's no hip-hop. It took two weeks for me to learn to waltz."

Montalban interjects, living up to his character's name. "Now she floats on air," he says.

Three songs composed by Richard Rodgers for other musicals have also been added. "I guess the word is 'interpolated,'" says his daughter Mary Rodgers, whose own composing includes Broadway's Once Upon A Mattress.

"We always tried to make sure we're not robbing Peter to pay Paul. You obviously don't want to take Oh, What A Beautiful Morning and stick it in the middle of Cinderella. It wouldn't be doing a big favor to anybody that way."

Jason Alexander, cast as the prince's servant, sees Cinderella as doing a favor to the history of theatre, preserving the performances for posterity.

"There's very few pieces of film of Bernadette doing the thing I think she does best and that's true of a whole generation of performers working on Broadway that nobody knows about," says Alexander, who worked mostly in musical theatre in his pre-Seinfeld days.

"There's very little film of Tommy Tune, or of Gregory Hines. So not only are we losing that generation but we're going to lose the next one because they won't know who to look at in order to learn how to do this stuff.

"When Craig and Neil say they're committed to bringing this kind of entertainment back to the screen, they have my undying gratitude. I mean, I'll sweep up the floor after the movie, you know, whatever they need to be done. I think it's important we do it."