CINDERELLA STORY.(The Talk of the Town)

So you want to be a princess. Well, you'll have to come up with something a little less ambitious, like duchess or viscountess, because, for all the recent talk about how "we're moving in the right direction" on the job front in this country, at the moment the one princess position in the metropolitan area is filled, by Sarah Uriarte Berry, who plays the title role in the New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella." The musical, which was originally written for TV, in 1957, as a vehicle for Julie Andrews (who at the time was also starring in "My Fair Lady" on Broadway), is an uncomplicated version of the fairy tale, with no sociological overtones or psychosexual undertones, just pleasantly comic middle tones and optimistic tunes of romance. Only one song, a ballad with the opening lines "Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?," gets into any kind of murky, epistemological area. The City Opera production, which runs through this weekend at the State Theatre, has stayed faithful to the original, without any smarty-pants updating: the prince doesn't Google Cinderella, and she doesn't use a Roomba to clean the ashes from the fireplace. But there are still plenty of bits of funny business to go around, and the cast is made up of performers who can make the most of them: Lea DeLaria and Ana Gasteyer, who play the sour stepsisters; Renee Taylor and Dick Van Patten, as the king and queen; John Epperson (better known as Lypsinka, the nonpareil channeller of Joan Crawford, Dolores Gray, Lana Turner, and other grand ladies of the screen), as the wicked stepmother; and--ggrrrrrrooooowwww--Eartha Kitt, as Cinderella's fairy godmother. Rounding out the ensemble is Christopher Sieber, who,

having played two princes in recent years, in "Triumph of Love" and the 2002 revival of "Into the Woods," seems to be monopolizing the unthreateningly-handsome-prince market on New York stages.

Two weeks before the show went up, the cast was rehearsing in a large, stage-sized room at the State Theatre, which had chairs along each wall and tables holding the typical accoutrements of performers at work: bottles of water, a plastic bag of apple chunks that were darkening to autumn brown, Starbucks cups, and the orange that travels around the world to all rehearsals and study sessions ...