Mary Martello's "Happily Ever After'

Mary Martello is a versatile Philadelphia-based actress blessed with a charming stage presence, a good sense of comic timing and a competent singing voice. To her one-woman show, Happily Ever After, she also contributes a cute idea: What do you suppose happened to all those fairy-tale heroines after they found their charming princes?

Thus in the course of 90 minutes and a half-dozen costume changes Martello introduces us to a menopausal Beauty (abandoned by her Beast for a younger woman and left to raise a teenager by herself), a Cinderella reduced to running a castle-cleaning service because her dense Prince Charming blew the royal exchequer on a Ponzi scheme, a narcoleptic Sleeping Beauty, a seriously obese Gretel (victim of too many gingerbread cookies), and a wheelchair-bound Snow White living out her days in a nursing home.

Unfortunately, this intriguing concept is undermined by a weak script that's too often repetitive and obvious (e.g., "I always knew my Prince would come," "Sleeping Beauties eventually snore"). I laughed out loud just once: at Martello's raunchy Peter Pan, a bisexual lounge lizard (reinvented as "Peter Panties") who remains addicted to chasing lost boys and fairy dust even in his Medicare years.

Martello punctuates each skit with a couple of songs ("Que Sera, Sera," Patsy Cline's "Crazy," the Mr. Clean jingle) that go on much too long and seem to have been inserted for no reason other than to break up her monologue. These tunes might have served Martello's purpose if she'd updated the lyrics to match her revisionist characterizations, but Martello sings most of them straight, so that I found myself thinking, "Why am I listening to this?"

Happily Ever After appears to be Martello's first attempt at writing for the stage. She deserves credit for trying something new instead of clinging to her past successes. God knows that's more than Cinderella or Snow White ever did.♦


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