Diana
This number, titled “The Dress,” encapsulates the combination of bad taste and tasty badness that is Diana, one of the most enjoyable Broadway farragos of the 21st century so far. The real Princess Di died in 1997 at the age of 36, and her story might be the stuff of opera. Instead, in defiance of the potential gravity of their subject, book writer Joe DiPietro and composer David Bryan—who share blame for the show’s lyrics—have opted for a campy, dishy pop-rock clip job of memorable moments from Diana’s life, rendered in a stream of ploddingly banal rhyming couplets set to tunes that sometimes assume a vaguely 1980s accent.
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