Call it zany, whacky or just plain goofy, but director Lisa Lincoln's version of Cinderella, as performed by the Eldorado Children's Theatre and Teen Players next weekend, aims to put the folderol and fiddledeedee back in local musical theater.

"I love the story, but it's often so overdone," said Lincoln, also a part-time musical theater instructor at Santa Fe Preparatory School, and vocal teacher at NDI, "so I wanted it to be silly while keeping the story intact."

And silly it is, by all appearances at Tuesday night's rehearsal.

For starters, Cinderella's stepmother is played by Aric Wheeler, 17, a senior at St. Michael's High School, who said he is trying to bring a drag queen personality to the character. "I also want her to be angry, shrill and unpleasant, which is the opposite of me."

And talk about your madcap merriment, Wheeler's costume, and that of Cinderella's stepsisters, make Lady Gaga's outfits look like something out of Les Misérables.

Designed by Anna DeMay of Costumes! Ltd., in Santa Fe, they're poofy, gaudy, splashy and brash, with a twist of Dr. Seuss and Alice in Wonderland thrown in.

In Lincoln's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which she calls the Cinderella Different, you can expect both the royal and common-folk characters — all 41 of them — to bounce, pounce and occasionally prance about the stage. Nobody stays still for very long.

The often flustered and addle-minded fairy godmother, played by St. Michael's High School senior Maria Ayala, shows up on the evening of the ball (of course) to rescue the put-upon Cinderella. But in Lincoln's version, a godmother apprentice, played by Olivia Sapeta, is employed to keep the fairy godmother on track.

"I'm a very clumsy fairy godmother until it comes to my dancing," said Ayala. She said the character is quite caught up in her own fairyness, frequently glancing admiringly into a hand mirror. "She's very outgoing, but very conceited. She wants to help people, but makes everything about herself."

In contrast, the two most ordinary, down-to-earth characters are actually Cinderella (played by 16-year-old Alli Brimacombe, a junior at the New Mexico School for the Arts) and the prince (played by 17-year-old Kegan Malec, a senior at the Academy for Technology and the Classics).

Brimacombe said her Cinderella is much like herself, "a positive person even though her circumstances might not be the best."

Malec said his character "is very much the opposite of me — sappy and all lovey-dovey." It's his first time in a leading role, and he says that while his parents, Pierre Barrera and Mona Malec, both actors, support him wholeheartedly, early on they felt that, "Oh no! Our son is going to end up like us."