It's laughably dreadful, and the performances are (even) worse than the writing and direction - which is remarkable, given the atrocious Act Two songs for James Hewitt and Paul Burrell. Some of it is unintentionally very funny, but most of it is just plain bad.
And I don't think I've ever seen worse performances as Prince Charles and the Queen than Roe Hartrampf and Judy Kaye give here. She for some reason chooses to play the Queen as a bad actress playing Imelda Staunton playing the Queen in a terrible Hallmark movie, and he has obviously never seen or heard any footage of Prince Charles and is playing a walking hatstand with a bad public-school English accent.
Jeanna de Waal doesn't look like Diana (the awful wigs don't help), doesn't sound like Diana, doesn't capture Diana in any way, but gets full mileage out of both her facial expressions. The only actor to come out of it with her dignity intact is Erin Davie as Camilla Park and Ride.
I suppose the producers thought Diana's name would bring an audience through the door, and that therefore nobody needed to put in any effort. Maybe it will, but the show doesn't deserve it. This isn't Carrie - a misguided catastrophe with a few good things in it. This is a shoddy, inept, cynical, laughably crass waste of time, money, and electricity that demeans every single real-life person it portrays.
(And no, by the way, I am most definitely not a royalist). |
