DI LADY DI


Serendipitously timed to coincide with the arrival of Season Five of Netflix’s The Crown, the pre-Thanksgiving return engagement of Di Lady Di makes it abundantly clear why Charlotte Munson’s cleverly titled solo bio-musical was named Best Musical at Hollywood Fringe Festival 2022.

 A dozen or so songs co-written by Munson (music, lyrics) and her father Richard (music) recall Lady Diana Spencer’s life from childhood to young adulthood to courtship to a marriage that started out a fairytale and ended a nightmare.

And this Porters of Hellsgate production does it all in just over an hour.

 A very young Diana recounts in song how her mother gave birth to three daughters in a row before at long last a male heir was born, then sings of her efforts to “make it better” when her parents’ marriage started falling apart.

Then came romance with a prince, and once her virginity had been firmly established by The Firm, there was marriage to a man whose affections, she was soon to learn, lay elsewhere.

And all the while, the eyes of the world were upon Diana, abetted by paparazzi sharks, whose prying lenses never gave a young princess a moment of peace as she fought for both her marriage and her sanity with virtually no one by her side.

Betrayal was followed by divorce was followed by Diana’s humanitarian efforts to rid the world of land mines and AIDS.

And the rest, as you most certainly know, is history.

Di Lady Di’s songs range from operatic to Broadway (with hints of Andrew Lloyd-Weber, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim) to pop, and Munson sings them as gorgeously as if she were on stage at the Met, starring on the Great White Way, or headlining Vegas.

Munson’s Diana converses with multiple characters along the way (some of them live, some of them her own prerecorded voices), she harmonizes with the latter, and she even shares a dance with Prince Charles (or at least with his jacket).

Not only that, but Diana’s posh accent is so spot-on, it comes as a real shock to hear Munson’s own American vowels when she addresses the audience as herself at the hour’s end.

Munson delivers a thoroughly captivating, ultimately quite moving performance in a production ingeniously staged by Alicia Gibson (who co-directed the Fringe original with Charles Pasternak), with special snaps to a sequence in which Munson dons close to a half-dozen masks to play assorted court gossips.

Amelia Boyce Munson has come up with some graceful choreography-for-one, Thomas Bigley’s lighting design illuminates Will Block’s white gauze curtain-adorned set to vibrant effect, Drina Durazo’s projections provide not just chapter titles but snapshots of Diana’s life, and a series of aptly designed costumes take Diana from childhood innocence to grown-up glamour and glitz. (Munson even manages to convert a white bedsheet into a wedding dress as the real-life Diana’s is projected above her.)

Last but not least, Brittany Pirozzoli duets gloriously with Munson in a moving end-of-show coda, backed by Geoffery Scheer and Dorian Burks at the performance reviewed.

Ashley Bradbury and Benji Smax alternate with Burke, Pirozzoli, and Scheer as chorus singers. Quinn O’Connor is production stage manager. Having just watched Season Five, Episode One of The Crown only hours earlier, I was particularly primed for Di Lady Di’s Friday preview performance, and to my delight, both Netflix and The Porters of Hellsgate have delivered the goods. Not only that, but the amazing Charlotte Munson takes what it took a cast and crew of thousands to create and does it pretty much all on her own.

Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd, North Hollywood. Through December 4.
www.portersofhellsgate.com

–Steven Stanley
November 11, 2022

Tags: , ,

Comments are closed.