Diana—The Musical comes along after other recent dramatic recreations of the life of Princess Di: the Netflix series The Crown and Pablo Lorrain’s movie Spencer. The Crown delved into the relationship among Diana, Charles, Camilla and the royal family, centered by a sympathetic Emma Corrin as Di, while Spencer was an often risible fever dream in which Kristen Stewart does a weirdly breathy impression rather than a truly interesting characterization, despite the ridiculous awards talk accompanying her portrayal. 

 

Diana—The Musical is a kind of mixture of The Crown and Spencer, with its clumsy and unsatisfying blend of pop, camp, melodrama and comedy centered by a recognizably humane Diana, played with vigor and intelligence by Jeanna de Waal. Unlike Stewart’s impersonation in Spencer—which has little nuance—de Waal’s Diana is closer to Corrin’s lovely, multilayered turn in The Crown.

 

The show’s first act, unfortunately, is an ungainly mess: director Christopher Ashley and choreographer Kelly Devine move briskly from scene to scene in order to keep the focus off the soggy book, lyrics and music of Joe DiPietro and David Bryan. 

 

Careening wildly from bombastic rock which sounds like Jim Steinman/Meatloaf outtakes to interchangeable ballads (too bad “I Will” isn’t the Beatles tune), the songs rarely propel the plot or engage the ear, so Ashley’s busy staging and Devine’s clever movements are needed to propel the action, as during Diana and Charles’ first date, a cello recital by renowned Russian musician Mstislav Rostropovich becomes, in Diana’s bored mind, a dance raveup that the then-teenager would much prefer to such a staid performance.

 

The second act is marginally better because there are a couple of campy interludes taking liberties with Diana’s relationships with Charles (the colorless Roe Hartrampf), Camilla (the sensational—and appealing—Erin Davie) or Queen Elizabeth (the always superb Judy Kaye). 

 

The second-act curtain raiser, “Here Comes James Hewitt,” features Diana’s favorite author and step-grandmother, romance novelist Barbara Cartland (Kaye again, and hilarious) to acidly describe Di and Charles’ crumbling marriage and how soldier James Hewitt became her lifeline, in and out of bed. 

 

Another act two number, “The Main Event”—staged as a mock boxing match between the princess and Camilla a la Ali-Frazier (a line even mentions “the thrilla in Manila,” which happily rhymes with “Camilla”)—approaches the deliriousness of “Hewitt.” 

 

But these moments are few and far between. And the show ends with “If,” a most puzzling closer. After Diana gets her divorce with the queen’s blessing, she sings of looking forward to her newfound freedom along with her young sons, who are smartly never seen onstage. But instead of allowing her that brief moment of happiness, the show’s ensemble mentions, portentously, what happens in Paris in August 1997, when Diana was killed in a car crash while being chased by photographers. 

 

Diana leaves the stage silently and the ensemble strangely gets the last word. We all know what ultimately happened to her, so why deny our heroine her deserved moment of triumph, however admittedly brief?