By D. Lynn Smith
When I was 8 years old my family moved in with my grandparents so my mother could help take care of my ailing grandmother. My 6-year-old sister Renee and I shared a bedroom upstairs. On this one special night, my dad carried our huge console TV up the stairs and into our bedroom so that we could watch Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. It took a little bit of adjustment with the rabbit-ear antennas, but soon we were held in thrall for the duration of the production, and beyond. As a matter of fact, Renee and I both count this as one of our favorite memories of our childhood.
Fast forward to 2015. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella is back on the stage and playing at the Smith Center in Las Vegas. I was so full of anticipation that for six months I kept looking at the tickets to make sure Paul and I wouldn’t forget the date, as we sometimes do.
Finally the day arrived. Paul and I dressed in our Sunday best and drove to the Smith Center. We found our seats; the theatre was packed. The lights went down, the stage came to life, and Cinderella began. Except … it’s different. Yes, there are the same songs I know and love, but the storyline is different. I don’t remember a giant praying mantis. I don’t remember a prince with an identity crisis. What was happening?
At intermission I scour the program and read that when Robyn Goodman was asked if she wanted to produce a new version of Cinderella, she said yes, but only if Cinderella “can save the Prince as much as he saves her. She has to be a more active character.”
In this new production, Cinderella makes the prince realize that his people are being mistreated and helps him realize the changes needed to make a more equitable government. She brings kindness to a court overwhelmed with ridicule and sarcasm. But this storyline felt tacked on instead of intrinsic to the narrative. It felt like an unsuccessful mashup between R & H’s Cinderella, and Drew Barrymore’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story (which I also enjoyed).
There has been a lot of flak over the Disney princesses and how they are always rescued by the men, and I agree with the criticism. Luckily, this trend has been changing with movies like Frozen, where there really wasn’t a villain, just a young woman trying to hide who she really was because her parents can’t accept her. The true love that saves the day in this film is between sisters, not a man and a woman.
Then there’s Maleficent, whose heart is broken and turned dark by betrayal. She watches over the princess she has cursed, and comes to love her as a mother does her daughter. So when it comes time for true love’s kiss, it comes from this mother/daughter relationship. The mother heals the daughter, and then the daughter helps to heal the mother physically (releasing her wings) and emotionally, teaching her to love again so she can become whole.
I love these two movies. And I appreciate what Robyn Goodman was trying to do. There’s a great need for stronger women protagonists. But for me, this new Cinderella lost the magic of the original.
Remember that I was only 8 and my sister only 6 when we saw this movie. We didn’t get the message that Cinderella was rescued by the prince. On the contrary, we felt Cinderella created the magic and rescued herself.
If you ask us who played Cinderella, we‘d both answer, Leslie Ann Warren. Ask who played the Fairy Godmother, we’d answer Celeste Holmes. (Imagine my thrill when I got to work with Celeste Holms on the TV Show, Promised Land. She was as wonderful and elegant as a fairy godmother should be!) Now ask us, “Who played the prince?” Uhm. I wouldn’t be able to tell you. My sister Renee might answer Alan Quartermaine, because years later the “prince” was in her favorite soap General Hospital. But I digress.
Renee’s and my two favorite songs from the movie are In My Own Little Corner, a song about dreams and about being anything you want to be, and It’s Possible, a song that tells us it’s possible to make dreams come true. We started singing these two songs immediately after seeing Cinderella, and continue to do so to this day. While the other songs are wonderful and magical as well, it’s these two songs that made an impression on our young minds. They told us we could be anything we wanted to be, do anything we wanted to do. They told us it’s okay to dream and dream big. And we did. And we both went out and made our dreams come true and continue to do so.
So the moral of the story is, not all princess stories have to be changed to make the protagonist a strong, female character. As a matter of fact, I think the most important lesson women and girls must embrace is that strong, powerful women believe in themselves and their dreams. The original Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella taught two little girls that lesson so long ago in 1965. And it continues to resonate with us today.
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