Jesse
Green

March 24, 2023

That’s because “Bad Cinderella” is not the clever, high-spirited revamp you might have expected, casting contemporary fairy dust on the classic story of love and slippers. It has none of the grit of the Grimm tale, the sweetness of the Disney movie or the grace (let alone the melodic delight) of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Instead, it’s surprisingly vulgar, sexed-up and dumbed-down: a parade of hustling women in bustiers and shirtless pec-rippling hunks.

Brittani
Samuel

March 23, 2023

Ultimately, “Bad Cinderella” proves there is something worse than a new musical being bad:  being unoriginal.

Greg
Evans

March 23, 2023

What Bad Cinderella does have is an amusing enough premise, an appealing score of songs that please in the moment, a gorgeous set design, performers that give it their all, and just enough rousing, good-natured moments to hold onto hopes that Bad Cinderella will arrive somewhere transformative before Dorothy has to return to Kansas.

Naveen
Kumar

March 23, 2023

To clear up the obvious question, “Bad Cinderella,” which opened at the Imperial Theater Thursday night, isn’t good. Composed by Webber and with lyrics by David Zippel, it is a muddled and momentum-less retooling of the familiar fairy tale in search of a coherent point of view as if it were a glass-slippered foot.

Adam
Feldman

March 24, 2023

And now there is Bad Cinderella, a 2021 Andrew Lloyd Webber bauble that ran for a year in the West End as Cinderella but has tacked the word Bad in front of its title to make its U.S. debut. That’s a minor victory for truth in marketing, at least. As the old expression goes: If the shoe fits…

New York Theatre Guide

Amelia
Merrill

March 24, 2023

Despite McLean’s humorous victories, Bad Cinderella is a flimsy, uninspired shadow that invests no confidence in its characters and chugs along without a thesis. It takes a familiar story and a veteran Broadway composer, hoping this will be enough, but at what cost? What is the musical trying to do, if even the possibility of spectacle or entertainment is hampered by its misogyny?

Johnny
Oleksinski

March 24, 2023

For a musical with the drunken confidence to slap the word “Bad” in front of a classic title, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Bad Cinderella,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, doesn’t have much in the way of ‘tude and swagger onstage. Or brain cells.

Jackson
McHenry

March 24, 2023

It’s not a fiasco, or even a fiasca, because that would be more fun. In fact, its occasional baseline competence makes it all the more insubstantial. Don’t ask me to try to hum any of its tunes, aside from the endlessly repeated title song. It’s giving forgettable. It’s giving … why?

Matt
Windman

March 24, 2023

If not necessarily bad, “Bad Cinderella” (which often feels like “Cinderella” combined with “Shrek” and “Clueless”) isn’t exactly great either.

New York Daily News

Chris
Jones

March 24, 2023

“Bad Cinderella” says it all.

Why, one wonders aplenty as one watches, did such a distinguished personage of the musical theater as the incomparable Andrew Lloyd Webber choose to spend some of his precious remaining time on Earth on a musical updating of a beloved fairytale that (a), has no demonstrable respect whatsoever for the dramaturgical structure of the source and (b), comes with a crass and mostly tasteless sense of humor that feels woefully out of sync with the moment?

Tim
Teeman

March 24, 2023

All through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s inane mish-mash of a Broadway musical Bad Cinderella (Imperial Theatre, booking to Sept 23) the nagging question is: what makes this Cinderella “bad” in any interesting, intriguing, meaningfully different way? The answer: not much.

Entertainment Weekly

Emlyn
Travis

March 24, 2023

Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s Bad Cinderella is not nearly as bad as it would like you to believe. After a complicated West End run, which was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the musical mastermind behind Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera has brought his freshly-revised retelling of the beloved Disneyfied folktale to the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. However, even with its crystalline heels, the show certainly hasn’t found its footing.

Observer

David
Cote

March 23, 2023

Maybe in another universe Bad Cinderella has hot dog fingers. Or one where the creative team of Bad Cinderella abandoned this garish, braindead riff on the fairytale before it could stink up Broadway.