The ingredients of “Once Upon a One More Time” — various fairy tales, a bunch of Britney Spears songs, a how-to-strut-and-tut manual — may very well have been fed into a computer and reformulated by Chatbot GPT. For all I know, the musical might unfold in a different, random sequence of songs, words and dance every night at the Marquis Theatre, where it had its official Broadway opening Thursday.
Well, actually, having seen an earlier incarnation of this bombastic, mechanical entertainment in 2021 at D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, I know that it plays out as it did before. Little has been done to address its deficiencies. The central flaw is a slipshod story that just doesn’t track — I know, I know, it’s all supposed to be a sugary coconut-cream cupcake of a show, not meant to awaken serious palates. Still, Jon Hartmere’s book is such a hodgepodge of disjointed ideas that software intervention might actually have helped."