Sleeping Beauty Wakes

La Jolla Playhouse

La Jolla, Calif.

(858) 550-1010

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This new musical “whisks a classic fairy tale to a modern-day locale” and then “freely mixes medical science with fairy dust,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. A collaboration between Tony-winning playwright Rachel Sheinkin and members of the indie band GrooveLily, this retelling of Charles Perrault’s 1697 fable takes place in a sleep-disorder clinic. Rose, a young woman who “hasn’t opened her eyes in an eon,” is brought to the clinic and put in the company of four recovering insomniacs. Soon, “Rose’s dream life begins to influence the REM cycles of those snoozing beside her,” with the starchy clinic director morphing into the evil fairy who dispatches Rose into her endless slumber and a handsome orderly acting as the prince whose kiss liberates Rose from her spell. Sheinkin’s uneven script doesn’t quite realize “the potential of this winning conceit,” but “the inherent charm of the piece captivates our imagination.”

The show also finds “some real beauty” of its own by updating the original fable’s “themes of risk, loss, and rebirth,” said James Hebert in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Aspen Vincent, “a fiery and funny” Rose, is captivating—though some of Doug Varone’s more taxing choreography leaves her a little breathless. Meanwhile, the “funny and rich-voiced” Kecia Lewis-Evans proves a worthy foil as the doctor. She turns “The Wheel Goes Round,” a “weird little harpsichord-accented number” by GrooveLily’s Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda, into a showstopper. A few kinks in the set and sound quality keep this production from being a truly sublime experience. But what’s already there “verges on drop-dead dreamy.”