Britney Spears has shared her support for Once Upon a One More Time, the jukebox Broadway musical based on her music catalog.
In a brief post shared on her Instagram on Thursday, the pop icon sent well wishes to the production’s cast and crew ahead of the show’s opening night performance at the Marquis Theatre. “Good luck to the hardworking cast and crew of ‘Once Upon a One More Time,’” she wrote alongside a photo of the show’s logo. “I’ve seen the show and it is so funny, smart and brilliant.”
Produced by Tony winners James L. Nederlander and Hunter Arnold, the musical comedy is opening Thursday night following previews, which began May 13. Written by Jon Hartmere and directed-choreographed by Keone and Mari Madrid (Beyond Babel, Karate Kid), the show is inspired by music performed and recorded by Spears.
“Oops I Did It Again,” “Lucky,” “Circus” and “Toxic” are among the songs that serve as the soundtrack for this fairy-tale book club featuring classic characters like Cinderella, Snow White, Little Mermaid, Rapunzel and more, whose lives are upended by a rogue fairy godmother who decides to drop The Feminine Mystique into their laps.
The show set a pre-Broadway run in Chicago for 2019 that was pushed to 2020 before the pandemic shut down the live theater industry across the country. But in December 2021, Once Upon a One More Time held its world premiere at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, months before a Los Angeles judge officially ended Spears’ conservatorship. Ahead of the show’s opening, Nederlander and Arnold confirmed the musical is fully authorized and licensed by Britney Spears, and that the license agreement was negotiated, agreed to and signed post-conservatorship by the Grammy-winner in 2022.
While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of its official opening, leading members of the production’s creative team shared their anticipation about the show’s long journey to the stage, and their gratitude to the cast, crew and Spears for making it happen.
“We’re very grateful to this cast, this company that has just taken this project head on and said, we really want to not just be a part of this, that we want to embody everything that Britney has stood for,” co-director and choreographer Keone tells THR, noting that the singer embodies joy, happiness and kindness. “We’re so happy that we’re able to get the confirmation that she was supporting the show post conservatorship, so that we can support her fully by creating this work wholeheartedly and stand for the things that she directly stood for.”
“It is so wonderful to go into the audience every night and feel people interacting with it,” director-choreographer Mari Madrid added. “The last handful of years has been so crazy for humanity, so to be able to be in a room with people in person and feel joy is just so refreshing.”
For Hartmere, the journey with the musical — which has gone through a series of changes over the last half decade as it made its way from Chicago to D.C. and now Broadway — has left him feeling appreciative of the time that helped shape and reshape the musical’s story alongside the show’s director-choreographer team.
“Just how long it’s taken to get here — it’s felt a bit like Christmas morning, but the clock has stopped, and I don’t just mean with COVID,” he said, speaking to the live theater industry’s pandemic pause. “I was so excited to get this out there, but when I look back, if we had done that very first version, I wouldn’t even know Keone and Mari, who are the most delightful, amazing humans on the planet. We wouldn’t have some of the cast.”
For producer Arnold, the production was only possible with Spears’ stamp of approval. He said, “Everybody involved really believed for this thing to work spiritually, it has to be an homage to the iconography of her career, and it has to be a direct benefit to her.”
Caitlin Huston contributed to this report.
