Todrick Hall has become a YouTube sensation over the past couple of years thanks to his imaginative videos riffing on familiar cultural nuggets. Among the more popular efforts by the former American Idol contestant: the impressively rendered Mean Girls set in a predominantly black high school, a parody of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast set in the ’hood, and an elaborately staged flash mob to Beyoncé’s “End of Time” in the middle of a Target store.
His latest full-scale musical production is “Cinderoncé,” a short film in which, as you may have guessed, Cinderella and Beyoncé become one in a fantastically kitschy way. Set entirely to the pop star’s music, the video traces the familiar fairy tale of the young woman with the glass slippers, with brilliant choreography and pitch-perfect costuming. And the musical excerpts are well coordinated with their designated plot points; “Why Don’t You Love Me,” for instance, is used for the sequence where the evil stepsisters and stepmother attempt to prove to the prince that the slipper is theirs. Hall himself appears as the prince.
This isn’t Hall’s first foray into Cinderella-themed territory. Last year he made the equally fun “CinderFella,” though that time around, the video was a very explicit promotion of marriage equality—it ends with the title card “Legalize Love”—and Hall starred as the lead in search of his prince. He also culled from other pop divas Katy Perry and Rihanna while changing around some of the lyrics and weaving in remixes of songs from the original Disney version of Cinderella. Two things are consistent in both videos, however: the incredible presence of famous drag queen Shangela, and the awesome re-interpretation of a fairy tale classic.
