You Better Work! Adapting the Britney Spears Musical for Broadway Junior

Broadway’s Britney Spears jukebox musical Once Upon a One More Time was short-lived in its original run at the Marquis Theatre, but now it’s ready for a new life and a new venue: a middle school near you.

Yes, Music Theatre International is bringing the show about fairy tale characters discovering self empowerment to its Broadway Junior catalogue, which adapts full-length Broadway shows into 60-minute editions tailor-made for performers 18 and under. For most shows, that mostly means trimming down the book and songs, and putting some of those songs into keys made for younger singers. When it’s a Britney Spears musical, it also means figuring out what to do when one of the central songs is titled “Work Bitch.” But more on that later.

Playbill visited a recent workshop of the upcoming Once Upon a One More Time JR. to talk with its creators and one of its original stars, Briga Heelan, who came to surprise the youngsters helping to develop the new title. See highlights from the workshop and Heelan’s talk with the young performers in the video above.

“Work Bitch” aside, it turns out there’s lots of good reasons to put a Britney Spears jukebox musical—or at least this Britney Spears jukebox musical—into the mouths of babes.

“The first thing everyone said after seeing the show was, ‘It would be a fantastic Broadway Junior show,'” says John Prignano, MTI’s chief operations officer and director of development and education. Prignano oversees the creation of new Broadway Junior titles, working with youth theatre experts iTheatrics to not only create the adaptations, but also the curricular content that goes around them. “We kept hearing how exciting it was and how fun it was from everyone after they saw the show. And it is going to be a fantastic Broadway Junior show because of the connection to Britney Spears, and the story of it. It’s just fun.”

As for that story, as you might be able to tell from the title, Once Upon a One More Time is something of a fractured fairy tale, as conceived by book writer Jon Hartmere. The show takes place inside a little girl’s book of fairy tales, each character actualized as a real person who has to play out their story, as dictated by the Narrator. And their stories are just as we know them from our own childhoods, until O.F.G. arrives (original fairy godmother) with a copy of Betty Friedan’s seminal feminist tome The Feminine Mystique for Cinderella. Before long, the rags-to-riches princess has read enough to have some disturbing questions about her role in her own story. When she starts sharing her new bedside reading with the other fairytale princesses, suddenly everyone is getting ideas about how their stories should maybe change, mostly in ways that would give them some control and autonomy over their own lives while divorcing them from being quite so focused on bagging a prince.

“The core story has always been about owning your own story, reclaiming it as yours to tell, that only you get to decide what happily ever after looks like,” says Hartmere. He joined the project years before it made it to Broadway, and says he had near carte blanche when dreaming up a story to place around Spears’ songs. The only directive he had was that it could not be a musical about Spears’ own life. Her camp said Spears was particularly fond of fairy tales, and Hartmere found her songs to overwhelmingly have themes of empowerment. The plot of Once Upon a One More Time was born.

“Certainly as a gay man who had to figure out a story for himself, that message resonated for me,” Hartmere shares. “There’s so much freedom involved in making that choice. And there’s a power to her catalogue. There’s a power in that people know she’s authentically herself. She’s an empowered woman.”

The cruel irony is that, as anyone who has been following entertainment news in the past few years knows, Spears herself has endured more than her share of loss of control. Most notably, she spent 13 years under a fairly oppressive conservatorship controlled by her father (notably also the benefactor of much of the proceeds of her performances), leaving her unable to make virtually any decisions without getting permission from dad.

Following a swell of online outrage and legal action, that conservatorship was dissolved in 2021, just eight days before Once Upon a One More Time started previews for its world premiere pre-Broadway engagement at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Suddenly, it was an odd kismet that Spears herself had reclaimed her freedom just as Hartmere’s fairytale princesses were learning to reclaim their lives via Spears’ songs. “I would love to say that was purposeful, but no,” Hartmere admits. “We started it so long ago, before anybody, or at least before I knew what was going on.”

Heelan, who starred as Cinderella in the musical’s D.C. and Broadway runs, remembers growing up and seeing Spears perform on TV—she was especially inspired by the music video for “Circus.” “There was something about her tenacity, and a way that she took up space and moved through space and invited people into a space that I found unbelievably powerful and captivating,” she remembers. “When you’re growing up, you try things on. How does this feel? How does this feel? Her ability to do that as an entertainer was very inspiring to me, and absolutely influenced the way that I learned to feel powerful in space.”

And, she says, that last bit is why the world needs a Once Upon a One More Time JR. Just as the little girl reading her bedtime stories in the show learns from her favorite princesses as they take the reins on their own stories, the young actors that will perform this musical at their school or local theatre group will get to internalize that message even more as they work to tell that story to their audiences. “It’s a story of a character going, ‘Oh, something doesn’t feel right to me,'” Heelan says. “Of having the courage to listen to your gut and your instinct in your heart, recognizing something’s not right and questioning it. It’s a story we need right now—and from the mouths of young people.”

Add to that the fact that Once Upon a One More Time did not have a very long run on Broadway—just 83 performances in fact. This new Junior adaptation means the show and its message will go on, which its creators say softens the blow of that brief run. “The show deserved more,” Heelan says. “We didn’t even get to record a cast album. This is exciting, a way of continuing on its legacy.”

Hartmere says Broadway was always only part of the picture anyways. “People don’t always understand that a Broadway run is just one part of a show’s story,” he says. “There’s a whole other world for what a show can be, how wide its impact can be, regardless of how long it ran the first time.”

But there is an elephant in the room—and we’re not talking about the pachyderms in Spears’ “Circus” music video. Do these kids, some of them from this summer’s workshop young enough to have been born in the year of our lord 2015, even know who Britney Spears is?

“I think they do?” says Timothy Allen McDonald tentatively. McDonald is the founder and CEO of iTheatrics, which works with MTI on adapting shows for the Broadway Junior catalogue; and he directed the summer workshops of Once Upon a One More Time JR. “Well, their moms and dads listen to her. It was fun at performances watching the parents react as a song hit, like jamming to it, and then seeing the kids react to their parents. These are definitely oldies for these kids, but they’re goodies. They’re bangers, as the kids would say.”

“It really doesn’t matter if they know who Britney Spears is,” adds Prignano. “They know the songs, and they love how they’ve been reimagined into this fun story. They relate to it. They fall in love with it.”

And as for “Work Bitch?” Sorry, lovers of childhood chaos. That admittedly somewhat reclaimed slur has been swapped out for “Kid.” “You know, my high school wouldn’t have allowed it either,” Hartmere says laughing. His approval authority was more on his own work as the book writer than the songs’ lyrics, but as a self-proclaimed longtime Britney stan, he definitely has opinions on this alteration. “It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, and I think it’s used in a positive way there. But I think giving people an option is totally fine. My 11-year-old niece is probably not going to be singing that in her production. It doesn’t sound completely clunky. I’m here for it.”

Asked to share the show’s true heart, what groups performing either the full-length or Junior versions need to keep most front of mind, Hartmere makes a perhaps unusual connection: Sondheim (who, it bears mentioning, himself has a fairy tale musical in the Broadway Junior catalogue: Into the Woods).

“There’s a reason that we keep having this conversation about fairy tales and what they are teaching our children. Everything goes back to Sondheim: ‘Children will listen,'” Hartmere says. And he’s clear about what he wants kids to hear. “Your story is your own to tell. When we get away from that, when people start telling other people how to live their lives, there’s where the conflict comes from.” 

But the show’s real power might be that it wraps that very real, and often heavy, message into a snazzy and deeply entertaining package. McDonald says that’s why he’s not worried about finding educators who will want to bring Once Upon a One More Time to their own schools.

“It’s Britney Spears music with a fun, female empowerment story that your parents are going to love, your community is going to love, that you’re going to love directing,” McDonald boasts. “And your kids are going to have a blast telling this story.”

Work, kid!

For more on Music Theatre International’s Broadway Junior collection, visit MTIShows.com.