“The filmed Broadway show has crash-landed early on the streamer with hilariously awful songs, a musical mess to rival Cats.

If you built a time machine and used it to tell Diana that she would one day get her own “Evita”, she would be absolutely thrilled. However, Diana died a quarter of a century ago and will never get to see Diana: The Musical. Some people get all the luck.

“Diana: The Musical” contains a song where Diana is chased through the streets of London by members of the paparazzi who all chant “Better than a Guinness, better than a wank / Snap a few pics, it’s money in the bank” in excruciating cod-cockney accents, so I’m sure you’ll understand that “good” isn’t necessarily the first adjective I’d reach for here.

What a genuinely bizarre work of art this is. Written by Joe DiPietro and the Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, Diana: The Musical has the look and feel of an intentional parody; a sort of “Springtime for Hitler” for Daily Express readers.

You could stick a pin in almost every song and pull out a line that makes the whole endeavour feel like it was specifically created as a berserk prank against the world. My particular favourite is the moment when Diana looks into a crib and tenderly sings: “Harry, my ginger-haired son / You’ll always be second to none.” But others might prefer the part when the Queen belts out a song about Prince Charles’s inability to keep it in his pants, or the song that appears to be called A Thriller in Manilla with Camilla. (…)
For the majority of its two-hour duration, it’s very clear that Diana: The Musical just wants to be a saucy romp. (…) But it cannot be that, because you cannot tell the story of Princess Diana without including its ending. Fatal car accidents have a tendency to suck the fun out of a room, and so the musical is forced to pivot to something approximating the climax of Hamilton. (…) But where Hamilton ended with a shocking, unknowable gasp, this ends with something so trite that may very well have been cribbed from a Live Laugh Love website.
(…)
It brings me no pleasure whatsoever to tell you that it isn’t better than a Guinness, and is considerably worse than a wank.”

(Stuart Heritage im Guardian über “Diana: The Musical”)

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