I Watched Netflix’s ‘Diana, The Musical’ So You Don’t Have To

The first song hadn’t even finished, yet the first word that sprung to mind was ‘trite’.

Diana, The Musical sounds bad, but overall it’s not as bad as you might expect. It rushes through the early days of Charles and Diana’s courtship and marriage, littered with wannabe-Frozen numbers like Underestimated (wait for the credits to roll, and there’s a lovely dramatic studio-recorded version for your aural pleasure). But this is not a Disney story, nor a fairy tale. Why was it treated as such?

Royalist or not, I think there is something disrespectful about the overall manner with which the Royal family are portrayed in this musical. Although a part of me did wonder if that was the aim of it, to hear our words played back to us. Diana’s character is consistently referred to as ‘dim’, ‘of no intellect’, and yet that isn’t really relevant beyond how she and Charles had little in common. By the time they married, her intellect didn’t matter – she was his wife. So at times, it’s a very sexist portrayal of Diana, and while that might align with attitudes of the 90s, I personally don’t need to keep hearing references to a young woman’s virginity. Yes, we know it mattered to the Royals. No, I don’t need it to be repeated. Save it for the documentaries.

One of the problems for me is that the musical is, at times, mean. Some of the lyrics seem to force outside opinions onto the character. One example is the line ‘In fact, I’m less than what I seem’, featuring in a song that can be heard with Charles and Diana’s visit to Wales. This line definitely seems more like an opinion of the character, rather than something credible that the character would say. The preceding lyric, ‘But I’m truly no-one special’ is much more realistic, so I almost don’t understand why what follows is there. Beyond the fact that it rhymes, it is one of the moments that leaves me wondering what the function of Diana, The Musical is: to entertain, to tell the story, or whether it is parody. In any of these instances, I’d say stick to The Crown, or The Windsors.

The songs are also the place you’ll find the most historical inaccuracies, particularly in an emotional sense. A lot of poetic licence has been taken when it comes to Charles’ perspective, making his ‘whatever love means anyway’ seem sweet, rather than vague.

Side note: the melody in the song Diana sings to William reminds me of Lionel Richie’s My Destiny, just slower (seriously, compare the two. I have an ear for this stuff. It’s probably just chord progression or something, but it still tickled me).

The musical comes into its own a little too late, during the last thirty minutes or so. It is at this point that it occurs to me that the perspective from which this has been produced may very well be objective, which is why there are little reminders to the audience that we perpetuate these things by the attention we give them. Also, every character is fair game, except for the Queen herself, whose character for the most part is granted the level of dignity I might have liked to see in other characters. Without the acknowledgement that this story does not end well, some scenes feel silly, regardless of whether or not they are fun.

Diana’s final song is actually quite moving, scattered with announcements of the accident in Paris that resulted in her death, after which the character exits, the flashing lights eventually fading to black. The rest of the cast flash back up to sing a little moral for us all, and then it’s over.

Yes it is cringy, but that isn’t to say there aren’t any memorable moments, they’re just few and far between. I’d only really recommend watching it if you want to add it to your mental collection of Royal Family memorabilia, but don’t expect to think of it fondly.