A heaping helping of music video-style dance numbers and over twenty of Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits go a long way towards keeping the audience at Jaxx Theatricals entertained for two and a half hours, but minus multi-million-dollar Broadway production values, Once Upon A One More Time’s book-related shortcomings are harder to ignore in its AEA Showcase Los Angeles Premiere.

As the show’s title suggests, Once Upon A One More Time combines songs made popular by the singer who way back in 1999 begged an ex to “Hit Me Baby One More Time” and fairy tales that open with “One Upon A Time” and end up “Happily Ever After,” precisely the kind of stories that Little Girl (Golden Lewis and Dream Lewis alternating in the role) enjoys having read to her at bedtime.

Chief among Little Girl’s fairytale faves is Cinderella (Kara Marie), who along with fellow storybook heroines Snow White (Emilia Vial), Princess Pea (Eva Haimovich), Rapunzel (Keyanna Cardenas), Little Mermaid (Rachel Logan), Esmeralda (Jenni Nicole Bloom), Belle (Anna Gagliardo), and Cinderella’s anti-heroine stepsisters Belinda (Jocelyn Barkenhagen) and Betany (KiSea Katikka), gets the show started with Britney’s breakout smash “Baby One More Time” before coming to the conclusion that maybe they’re not all that “Lucky” (lyrics tweaked from “Isn’t she lucky, this Hollywood girl” to “Isn’t she lucky, this fairy tale girl”) given how little agency they have in their lives.

Enter O.F.G. (Michelle Hakala Wolf), short for Original Fairy Godmother, who takes it upon herself to provide Cinderella with a well-worn copy of Betty Friedan’s seminal manifesto The Feminine Mystique, the better to answer the proverbial question, “If there’s nothing missing in my life, then why do these tears come at night?”

If the juxtaposition of fairy tales popularized by the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen in the 1800s (and Disney animators a century later), the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, and late-Nineties/early Aughts pop seems an awkward mix, it is, and unlike the similarly revisionist but far more successful (both commercially and artistically) & Juliet, the book that Jon Hartmere has confectioned for Once Upon A One More Time doesn’t give us nearly enough to care about, nor is it nearly as clever as & Juliet’s, nor does it find nearly enough organic ways to insert Britney hits into the story/stories it has to tell.

That’s not to say that Jaxx Theatricals’ Once Upon A One More Time isn’t without its pluses, chief among them production number after production number pizzazzfully choreographed by Kasmira Buchanan and Viktor Simon and performed with TikTok-precision moves by a talented young song-and-dance cast.

 MARQUE’s Prince Charming and his fellow Princes—Mischievous (Jeremy Lucas), Suave (Alexander Miller), Brawny (Jeremiah Taylor), Gregarious (Stephen Gregg), Affable (Jacob Walters), and Erudite (JD Morabito)—join in the dance mix when male backup is needed, though aside from the proudly promiscuous Charming, Hartmere’s book leaves them a largely anonymous bunch.

All of this means that it’s up to Vial’s bubbly, big-voiced Snow White to command the spotlight in every scene she’s in, and to Jill Marie Burke’s electrifying Stepmother to do the same in two of the evening’s biggest vocal showstoppers, first when ordering Cinderella to “Work Bitch” and later when joining vocals with the musical’s ubiquitous Narrator (Brian Whisenant) to diabolical effect in “Toxic.”

And I can’t not mention how adorable Jaxx mainstays Lucas and Morabito are as gay couple Clumsy and Erudite, who not only dance up a storm but share the evening’s most gosh-darn romantic kiss.

Director Colin Tracy deserves credit for scaling down a great big Broadway show to black box dimensions, and so does music director James Lent for providing live keyboard accompaniment to prerecorded tracks in place of an in-person studio band. (Geo Polk is sound designer).

An extravaganza of costumes by AnaRosa Cortes, Lucas, Keny Marine, and Morabito give the production a fairytale-meets-modern look, and Atticus Jones lights them with plenty of flash.

Still, especially given the barebones nature of Tracy’s set design, I can’t help wishing that L.A. had gotten to see Once Upon A Once More Time at least once in a production more in line with the big bucks Broadway original before intimate theater companies like Jaxx Theatricals got their turn at it.

Sophia Marie Rizzo is assistant director. Mario Underhill is lighting designer. Shannon McCon, Ellis Meng, Maria Puig, Rizzo, and Stephan Schmidt are swings. Sandra Kuker is publicist.

Jukebox musicals may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the ones that work (& Juliet, All Shook Up, and Mamma, Mia chief among them) do so not only because they have truly engaging stories to tell but because they manage to make it seem like their potpourri of Greatest Hits were written to tell the story and not the other way around.

Neither turns out to be the case with Once Upon A Once More Time, and though there are more than a few reasons to catch the show’s Jaxx Theatricals Los Angeles Premiere, it becomes clear fairly early on why & Juliet (which opened on Broadway nine months earlier) is still packing them in, both in New York City and on tour, and the similarly jukeboxy Once Upon A One More Time is not.

The Jaxx Theatre, 5432 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.
www.jaxxtheatricals.org

–Steven Stanley
October 24, 2025

Visit www.theatreinla.com/nowplayingrs.php for a review roundup of what’s now playing in theaters around Los Angeles.

Tags: Britney Spears, Jon Hartmere, Los Angeles Theater Review