THE PEOPLE’S PREMIERE The producers of “Diana,” which shut down previews — along with the rest of Broadway — in March, have announced that before the show returns to Broadway next year (God and medical science willing), it will appear on Netflix.
WERE YOU ONE OF the lucky few who saw “Diana” on Broadway in March? You had to be fast. Previews began on Monday, March 2, and ended the night of Wednesday, March 11 — the last evening that any Broadway theater was open. (If you’ve been in a coma: Everything closed down at that time because of the coronavirus pandemic. And if you’ve been in a coma, we hope you’re feeling better. Really, after March, you didn’t miss much.)
THE ONCE AND FUTURE CAST From left, Roe Hartrampf (Charles), Judy Kaye (Elizabeth II), Jeanna de Waal (Diana) and Erin Davie (Camilla), the stars of “Diana” on Broadway and on Netflix.
Maybe you’ve heard that the show is coming back — same cast, same director, et al. — next May (opening night: May 25), but the new news is that it’s coming to Netflix first. When? Netflix won’t say yet — only that the show (it’s a multi-genre musical focusing on Diana Spencer and Prince Charles’s courtship, marriage and uncoupling) will be filmed at the Longacre Theater in New York, without an audience, then shown on your home screen before it turns up, live, at the same theater.
WHATEVER ‘IN LOVE’ MEANS Prince Charles and Diana Spencer’s real 1981 engagement photo session, left, and the musical’s re-creation, starring Jeanna de Waal and Roe Hartrampf.
DIANA IS JEANNA DE WAAL, whom most of us have never seen (unless you caught one of the times she was the Broadway replacement for Lauren in “Kinky Boots,” between 2014 and 2016).
Jeanna (pronounced Gina) is a Brit, of course (well, half South African, but — you know). She’s 30, we think. She says she was 7 when Diana was killed in the auto crash in Paris, and her assessment of the late “people’s princess” is that her memory deserves to be celebrated because “she made everyone feel special.”
The role de Waal (playing herself in this outdoor photo) really, really hopes to play someday, she told Forbes magazine, is the Witch in “Into the Woods.”
A PRINCE AMONG MEN Roe Hartrampf, who appeared in the Second Stage production of “The Bad Guys” in 2012, plays Prince Charles in “Diana.”
Charles is Roe Hartrampf. He’s American — Southern, even. At least we can tell you that he graduated from high school in Atlanta and his family has a North Carolina farm. We are inferring that he acquired his ability to do a British accent while studying with Stella Adler and at New York University.
Hartrampf’s film career has included low-profile features like “Equity” (2016) and “Game Over, Man!” (2018), but he did do a four-episode arc on “Madam Secretary” in 2017. And he sang “I’m Still Here” (from “Follies”) on Stephen Sondheim’s online 90th-birthday party. Hartrampf’s companion in the outdoor photo is Hoagie.
‘DARLING, I’D LIKE YOU TO MEET MY MISTRESS….’ From left, Erin Davie as Camilla Parker Bowles, Jeanna de Waal as Diana and Roe Hartrampf as Charles in the original 2019 La Jolla, Calif., production of “Diana.”
Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s lover and future second wife, is Erin Davie, an actress who grew up in Nashville and made her Broadway debut playing Little Edie in “Grey Gardens.” Her most recent Broadway role was in “Sunday in the Park With George.”. Camilla has one of the show’s most poignant songs , “I Miss You Most on Sundays.”
Other self-explanatory musical titles include “Underestimated,” “Whatever Love Means Anyway,” “Here Comes James Hewitt” and “What Good Is a Prince?”
JUDY, JUDY, JUDY. Judy Kaye, a two-time Tony Award winner, plays Queen Elizabeth II, who in “Diana” really wants her eldest son’s first marriage to work.
AND QUEEN ELIZABETH II is Judy Kaye. Actually, Diana’s statement — “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” — in that notorious 1990s BBC interview — was slightly off. There were four. And the fourth, her mother-in-law, actually liked Diana.
Kaye is the show’s only real Broadway star, a two-time Tony Award winner, for “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Nice Work if You Can Get It.” She’s still probably most famous for understudying, then taking over, the lead in “On the Twentieth Century.” Overnight stardom, 44 years ago!
GEAR ROYALE The cast with some of William Ivey Long’s costumes for the show. Long has already won six Tony Awards for costume design, for “The Producers,” “Hairspray,” “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” “Grey Gardens,” “Crazy for You” and “Nine.”
The queen is not the villain in “Diana.” Neither is Charles. As Sarah Lyall wrote in her 2019 article in The New York Times, when the show was opening in California, there was a conscious “decision to not assign blame.”
The show, Lyall added, “presents its characters as victims of circumstance, like protagonists of a Greek tragedy.” For Team Diana, and we are legion, that’s kind of a disappointment. But probably a point of view worth considering.
“Diana: A New Musical,” by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro, directed by Christopher Ashley, begins streaming on Netflix on a date in 2021 to be announced. “Diana” opens on May 25, 2021, at the Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, thedianamusical.com