Friday, October 31, 1997 HAVE A BALL WITH CINDERELLA Disney charmingly updates the screen musical with a nod to past and present There has been much teeth-gnashing in recent decades over the death of the screen musical, but as with any death, there are reasons for it: The changes in musical tastes, which made it a bad career move for a pop star to get a hit out of a show tune; the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, which corraled the necessary talent and ponied up the dough; and the rise of the music video, which is pretty much where the screen musical has landed. Part of the beauty of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella, a breathtakingly new version of the 1957 TV original with Julie Andrews and the '60s remake with Lesley Ann Warren, is that it has found ways to surmount all three obstacles: It has cast pop stars in dramatic roles and shaped classical songs to fit them; it got $12 million out of Disney to do it right; and it hired a director, a writer and musical arrangers to give it a more contemporary look and feel. Airing in most of the civilized world at 7 Sunday night on ABC's The Wonderful World of Disney - but bumped to 2 p.m. Sunday on Detroit's Channel 7 because of a Lions game - Cinderella leaves you lightheaded with delight, like Gene Kelly pirouetting along the Seine or Fred extending his hand to Ginger. Unlike the recent, slavishly faithful Gypsy, which Bette Midler mangled badly, Cinderella makes changes in the text, adds new songs and finds visual correlatives to the material without losing one bit of Rodgers and Hammerstein's lilting, spinetingling romanticism. Starring Brandy - whose gawky sweetness reminded me of the young Audrey Hepburn, especially in Funny Face - Cinderella starts off on a dizzying note and doesn't let up. Its director, Robert Iscove, discovers fresh meanings in the Steadicam, a remarkably mobile unit that can swoop and caress without getting jittery. On ER, the use of the Steadicam is an affectation, a means of diverting your attention from the soap suds. In Cinderella, the camerawork enhances the themes: the search for love and identity and an escape from cruelty. In cinema, musical or otherwise, there has always been a schism between "mise-en-scene" (the arrangement of everything within the frame) and "montage" (cutting from one thing to another). Iscove scores with both: He shoots the ball scene, where Cinderella dances with the Prince (Paolo Montalban), with an intensity that makes you woozy, but when the Prince strokes Cinderella's cheek, and she closes her eyes in rapture, it makes you swoon in a different way. It can't be easy writing for Whitney Houston, but Cinderella's text-tinkerer, Robert L. Friedman, has come up with the perfect entrance line for her: "I'm your fairy godmother, honey." Houston, who co-produced this production, had wanted to play the lead herself years ago, but she's much more convincing as a bossy babe who gets things done, especially when she glides alongside Cinderella's carriage in a trail of fairy dust or when her awesome lung power is matched by Iscove's closing panning shots that dart through the kingdom like orgasmic eagles. The rest of the cast could not be improved upon - I can't recall a group of actors so ready to just do it: Bernadette Peters' Stepmother, alternately farcical and chillingly psychotic; Jason Alexander's steward, a fool who's nobody's fool; Whoopi Goldberg's Queen Constantina, who yelps like a Chihuahua whenever she's upset; Victor Garber's King Maximilian, wary and witty; and Natalie Desselle and Veanne Cox's Stepsisters, a Laverne and Shirley for the '90s. Everything about this Cinderella, in fact, seems up-to-date, even though it's traditional and fit for the whole family. And even though the score, reorchestrated by record producer Arif Mardin and music director Paul Bogaev, is minor, it feels major because everybody involved decided to respect the screen musical without living in the past. In modern terms: Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella rocks.