BWW Album Review: DIANA's Cast Recording Isn't Quite a Crown Jewel

While writing up my review of the cast album for Diana, I happened to stumble across a syndicated marathon of Smash. What might have been a distraction instead turned into exactly what I needed to make sense of a cast album that is intriguing, messy, sometimes excellent, sometimes disappointing, and never quite settles into what it wants to be. Like Bombshell, the fictional Marilyn Monroe musical, Diana attempts a throwback-pastiche score with baffling moments of camp to tell the story of an uber-famous blonde whose relationship with the press both made her and destroyed her. And, like Bombshell, the score to Diana vacillates between quite off-the-mark and genuinely affecting.

Starting from the early strains of "Underestimated," Joe DiPietro and David Bryan do their best to give Diana some complexity. Neither a manipulative villain nor a naïve child, Jeanna de Waal's Diana is a sheltered young woman dreaming of a fairytale and willing to fight to get it, only to discover that she's won something of a poisoned crown. Over the course of the album, her songs become less about other people and more about herself, reflecting this inner shift.

De Waal's vocals are far and away the best thing on this album. Even when given slightly generic songs like "I Will," she imbues every note with a sense of Diana's inner journey. Despite the vague, intentionally dated sounds of the score, there is almost a charming earnestness about it all, and De Waal is compelling at every step of the way.

Unfortunately, that earnestness masks the truth of the score and the show overall: it has very little new to say about one of the most (in)famous, most talked-about, most over-analyzed stories of modern celebrity. Charles feels sad! Camilla is worldly! The Queen and the royal family are repressive! The press is bad! Famous lines from real life are turned into songs, like Charles and the Queen's refrain of "Whatever Love Means Anyway" or Diana's interviews with Andrew Morton turned into the awkwardly-written "The Words Came Pouring Out."

Perhaps the strangest part of the whole score is its odd, inconsistent approach to camp. It never quite pushes things far enough to be satire, and instead reads like the kind of musical you'd see as a parody in a movie or an SNL sketch. Again, since it doesn't say anything new, it just feels like goofing off with low-hanging fruit. This is no slight to the talented cast, who are clearly giving their very best to even the weakest songs.

This approach is fine at some moments, but creates real dissonance in some of the most inappropriate moments of the story. James Hewitt's Magic Mike-style introduction, full of increasingly raunchy horse-riding puns? Laughable, but fun enough. The F-bomb-laden "The Dress"? Completely ridiculous, but catchy. The peppy "Snap, Click" paparazzi number, on the other hand, feels far too light for the subject matter. Even worse is "The Main Event," a song which frames a confrontation between Diana and Camilla as a boxing match-esque showdown that everyone is watching with glee. If the show had something to say here about making this an extension of the voyeurism directed at Diana, it might have worked, but as it sounds now, it's just an update on the two-dimensional "catfight" trope that feels downright tacky.

It's when the score quiets down and dares to think about the small moments that it shines. Sure, soaring ballads like the lovely finale "If (Light of the World)" are the ones that will surely start showing up in cabarets and audition rooms the second the sheet music becomes available. But because we already know the "big" story, it's the songs that turn inward that make the biggest impact.

For much of the story, the plot necessitates that Queen Elizabeth (Judy Kaye) be remote and forbidding and that Camilla Parker Bowles (Erin Davie) be a sly rival. Both women smartly get solos, though, that reveal their inner lives. Davie's "I Miss You Most on Sundays" is quite touching as she reflects on her wish that she could share the quiet, ordinary moments with Charles. Meanwhile, Kaye gets, essentially, the eleven-o'-clock number with "An Officer's Wife." Not only do the lyrics capture what is, reportedly, the real-life queen's habit of distancing herself by using third-person language, but it gives the fictional queen a chance to be more than an emotionless killjoy.

Instead, she reveals her own complicated romance, her own dreams dashed on the altar of duty, and a restrained sense that, while she doesn't approve of Diana's choices, she also understands. Camilla and the Queen, like Diana, also have had their lives go very differently than they planned and live with that pain every day. For a few moments in song, the show isn't just about one woman, but three who have something unexpected in common. The song reveals an instinct I wish the songwriters had leaned into more often: more of the characters, less of the headlines. Had they done so, Diana might have been a crowning glory indeed.

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