The Inside Story of How Diana: The Musical Brought the Late Princess to Broadway and Beyond
Jeanna de Waal is used to waiting. She first landed the title role in Diana: The Musical, which explores the life story of the late Princess of Wales, almost five years ago, beginning with a 2017 workshop at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater, which was followed by a run at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2019. The show’s Broadway debut at the Longacre Theater was scheduled for March 31 of 2020—but Diana made it through only nine preview performances before Broadway was shuttered. Weeks turned into months, but de Waal remained optimistic.
“I’ve kept the faith that we’re coming back this whole time,” she says.
And coming back they are. Diana: The Musical will be released on Netflix on October 1 before finally opening on Broadway November 17, making it the first Broadway musical to stream before its opening night onstage. Given the success of The Crown, the enduring appeal of the royal family, and the ferocious appetite for anything about the late princess, chances are it will be a runaway success.
Christopher Ashley, who has directed each iteration of Diana (including the Netflix film, which was recorded last summer without an audience), knew at once, all those years ago, that de Waal was his star. “She captured 19-year-old Diana’s shyness and spark, and she grew in conviction and maturity so that by her third scene we felt we were sharing the room with Diana at the height of her powers,” he recalls.
Born in Germany, de Waal grew up in Britain in an artistic household; she and her sister Dani, an actress turned software engineer, both attended the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts, and the family took weekend trips to London to binge West End shows. Though Dani left the theater world, Jeanna continued, making her West End debut at 22 in We Will Rock You. A year later, she moved to the U.S. with no agent and no job, but she soon landed her first Broadway role, in American Idiot.
Like Diana, de Waal is no mere ingenue. She has entrepreneurial instincts—it was her idea in 2017 to found Broadway Weekends, an adult theater camp taught by performers from New York and London, which she now runs with her sister. During the pandemic they pivoted to an online format called Broadway Weekends at Home, offering 80 workshops a month and special programs like a full-day course led by the original cast members of The Prom. It’s a way of democratizing theater and giving fans a chance to fully inhabit the material.
“We’re used to theater being this passive experience where we sit in an audience and receive it, and maybe discuss it at dinner,” de Waal says. “With Broadway Weekends, there is a real chance to deep dive both into material from shows, but also into your own experience of becoming an artist, whether you want to do that professionally or not.”
Her sister Dani agrees, adding that Broadway Weekends became a sort of global classroom and creative coping mechanism. “With the pandemic and the isolation everyone was experiencing, the need for a community became vital,” she says. “It was truly amazing to see the breadth of nationalities and ages who were all coming together.”
Since her show went dark, de Waal threw herself into expanding Broadway Weekends while hoping for updates about Diana. Last July, the cast gathered on Zoom to workshop some new pages and were surprised with the Netflix news—and given about four weeks before filming commenced. Cue the workouts; when the show was first in rehearsals, de Waal told T&C she was taking Gyrotonics classes to learn to move and stand like the princess. “She’s like a gazelle, the way she moves,” she said, noting that after the workouts (and thanks to lifts hidden in her shoes), “I will be significantly taller.”
De Waal says she grew up in a “Team Diana” household—when Diana died, her sister Dani recalls their mother and grandmother being as upset “as if they’d lost a personal friend”— but didn’t know much about her beyond her icon status. In preparing for the role, de Waal watched hundreds of hours of YouTube footage of Diana—but purposefully avoided any dramatized portrayals (though she is a keen follower of The Crown.)
The challenge in playing one of the most famous women in the world is to telegraph who she was, rather than what happened to her, and to project her brand of soft authority.
“Her power was in wanting to connect, in each moment, these small moments of interaction, and the hopes for those interactions,” de Waal says. “For a long time, before she harnesses her power, a lot of things are done to her. That was the unique challenge of this show, not to just sit there and have everything hit me, and not have momentum in my own show. I think there is great opportunity to explore new types of protagonists.”
Where there is a protagonist, there must be an antagonist, but de Waal resists calling any character in the production a villain. “If we start with Charles and Camilla, I have deep sympathy for them too,” she says. “I think this was a really complicated situation."
When it comes to today’s royals, especially Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, de Waal understands why they might want to find a way out of The Firm. “You get one life and you are allowed to follow that however you want,” de Waal says. “And if they think they'll be happier leaving the royal family, then custom or tradition is not what should hold them, and they should pursue that for themselves.”
After an undeniably dark and difficult era, de Waal hopes the musical can inspire audiences to believe again. “Even if you're a tiny little light and you seem to be in a black hole, and no one is helping you, trust that little inner voice,” she says. “We all have that, and we have got to listen to it.”
So in a way it’s fitting that Diana will be seen on the screen before the stage, beamed into living rooms around the world. It’s accessible and intimate, just like Diana herself—and the woman who has been waiting years to play her.
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