New York theater critics have given overwhelmingly negative reviews to the new Broadway musical Diana, which features a cast led by Jeanna de Waal (Diana), Roe Hartrampf (Prince Charles), Erin Davie (Camilla Parker Bowles), and Judy Kaye (Queen Elizabeth). The creative team includes Joe DiPietro (book, lyrics), David Bryan (music, lyrics), Christopher Ashley (direction), Kelly Devine (choreography), David Zinn (sets), William Ivey Long (costumes), Natasha Katz (lights), Gareth Owen (sound), Paul Huntley (wigs), Angelina Avallone, (makeup), John Clancy (orchestrations), and Ian Eisendrath (musical supervision, arrangements). Below is the original Broadway cast performing “If” on Good Morning America.
Broadway News (Charles Isherwood): Broadway jackals, get your tickets while you can. History is being made at the Longacre Theatre. Briefly, one suspects. On the other hand, Diana slouches toward tedium quickly, so that even the ghoulish fun of witnessing a magnificently misbegotten show palls by the end of the first act. … To her credit, de Waal gives a valiantly earnest performance, and puts across the score’s ballads and anthems with admirable vocal agility. Because of this, you eventually begin to feel almost as sorry for the actor as you do for the character she is portraying. … But everything and everyone this musical touches is somehow vulgarized.
New York Daily News (Chris Jones): The producers of Diana the Musical preempted their own Broadway opening by selling out their show to Netflix. … “The worst thing I’ve ever seen” was one of the kinder headlines. … Diana the Musical offers no meaningful insights (nor even ones lacking in meaning) into a woman who really should be allowed to rest in much-deserved peace. … Think too hard and you’ll get lost in a moral malaise over the decadence of these times when a young woman who was pursued to her death in a Paris tunnel becomes both a martyr and fodder for endlessly profitable objectification.
New York Stage Review (Elysa Gardner): In truth, Diana isn’t much more insipid than any number of musical hagiographies that have popped up in recent decades, and director Christopher Ashley, to his credit, guides it with a light hand. … The real star of Diana, though, is the peerless costumer William Ivey Long, who has drawn inspiration from some of the title character’s favorite designers, and crafted nifty stuff for the whole ensemble. I stopped counting de Waal’s costume changes before intermission, but suffice it to say that if a Tony Award were handed to the actor who juggled the most in one production, no other trouper would stand a chance this season. 2 out of 5 stars.
New York Times (Jesse Green): It may well win the prize as the tawdriest and least excusable wholesaling of a supposedly true story ever to belt its way to Broadway. … If you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying. … De Waal is left to embody each new incarnation of the character as quickly and superficially as she swaps William Ivey Long’s trick costumes, which could tell the story better on their own. … It’s just exploitative, doing to the Princess of Wales pretty much what the tabloid press — let alone the monarchy — did to her in the first place.
Time Out (Adam Feldman): The crowning moment in Diana, the royal mess of a biographical musical that is somehow now on Broadway, comes late. … Enter a couture-savvy courtier with sartorial advice. “How about this fuck you dress?” … “Fuckity-fuckity-fuckity-fuckity / Fuckity-fuckity-fuckity-fuckity,” chant the paparazzi. … This number, titled “The Dress,” encapsulates the combination of bad taste and tasty badness that is Diana … a campy, dishy pop-rock clip job of memorable moments from Diana’s life, rendered in a stream of ploddingly banal rhyming couplets. … For collectors of flop shows, Diana is a keeper: It goes for broke, and achieves it. 1 out of 5 stars.
Variety (Neveen Kumar): The almost impressively artless new Broadway musical … lacks any similar claim to daring, originality or taste. … The score might be entirely forgettable if not for the remarkable crudeness. … It could be camp — more sordid, more soapy, more altogether mad — if the creative team knew how to reconcile the ridiculousness of their project with the gravity of its true story. … What makes Diana so perverse is its refiguring of a real-life tragedy — with survivors who remain in the public eye — into a sort of limp and misshapen rom-com. … Even setting aside whether Diana’s family, and her memory, deserve better — don’t we?