A new comedy called The Sisters Grimm, which offers a playful twist on the Cinderella story, may bow Off-Broadway sometime this coming season. Three sets of producers are currently bidding for the New York rights to present the show, which is the work of playwrights Madison Tyler and James Doyle.

Interest in the show snowballed after a Miami Beach workshop during the 1999-2000 season. The production was greetly warmly by local critics and the six-week run quickly sold out. Interested producers are currently looking at a variety of Downtown theatre and working toward a winter opening.

The tuner tells the Cinderella story from the point of view of her wicked stepsisters. Evil siblings Licinda and Fabella Grimm are now 110 and 108, respectively, and the glass-slippered girl has gone on to meet her maker. With Cinderella out the way, the sisters want to set the record straight. As ever, the two are capable of anything. They smoke, drink and wrap their hair while they unfold the story, which involves sex, murder, drugs and other family secrets. Meanwhile, they angle to cash in on their famous stepsister's celebrity, fishing for corporate sponsorship and a sale of the movie rights.

Cinderella has been the subject of a couple well known stage musicals. Perhaps the best known is Rodgers & Hammerstein's television production, Cinderella, produced in 1957 and 1965 and remade by Disney in 1997. The broadcast was recently newly adapted for the stage and is now touring the U.S. in a production starring Debbie Gibson and directed by Gabriel Barre. Cinderella, her stepsisters and her Prince were also characters in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.

—By Robert Simonson