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The 1997 television production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella is one of the most beloved musical events of the last three decades. What it does not have – and has never had – is a soundtrack album.
In a new report, Vanity Fair tracked down the creative team behind the film to answer a question fans have been asking since the broadcast: why can’t anyone buy, stream, or download the Cinderella cast recording? The answer, according to the producers who spoke to the magazine, involves two rival record labels, a decades-long stalemate, and an album that its own producers say is finished and sitting in a vault.
The album was recorded across less than two days at Capitol Records, with the late Arif Mardin – an Atlantic Records legend who worked with Aretha Franklin and the Bee Gees – producing Whitney Houston’s material, and Disney music chief Chris Montan overseeing Brandy Norwood, about to become the first Black actress to play Cinderella on screen.
The sessions produced full studio versions of numbers including “In My Own Little Corner,” the Houston–Norwood duet “Impossible; It’s Possible,” and the Wicked Stepfamily’s “Falling in Love With Love,” performed by Bernadette Peters, Natalie Desselle Reid, and Veanne Cox. The cast also featured Whoopi Goldberg and Victor Garber as the Queen and King and Paolo Montalban as the Prince.
Here’s the catch. Houston was signed to Clive Davis’s Arista Records. Brandy was signed to Atlantic, which was building her as a mainstream R&B star off her platinum debut. According to the producers, Atlantic concluded that a Golden Age musical theatre album would muddy that image – and declined to participate.
“The fear, which put the kibosh on the album, was Atlantic feeling that it would ruin Brandy’s cred,” producer Neil Meron told Vanity Fair.
Producer Debra Martin Chase – the first Black woman to land a producing deal at a major studio – described years of going back to Atlantic and getting nowhere, and said Davis eventually offered to let a rival label put the record out rather than see it disappear. Atlantic, she said, still said no. Her verdict on the decision now: “In retrospect, so shortsighted, right?”
The film, meanwhile, became a phenomenon – 60 million viewers on November 2, 1997, and more than two million VHS copies sold by 1999, then the best-selling home video release of any made-for-TV movie.
The late Craig Zadan, who produced the film alongside Meron and Chase, said in a previous interview that the missing album was the greatest heartbreak of Houston’s career – a characterization Pat Houston, the singer’s former manager and the executor of her estate, confirmed to Vanity Fair. Releasing it, she said in a statement to the magazine, “would celebrate not just [Whitney’s] voice, but her vision.”
The report also identifies a newer complication: by the 2020s, at least three labels would need to sign off, with Meron telling Vanity Fair he has been told Disney’s Hollywood Records is now the holdup. A source close to Disney told the magazine that Disney Music Group has never owned the rights or masters to the album, and that it is not sitting in a Disney vault. A 2022 attempt around the film’s 25th anniversary also stalled.
There is one new voice in the mix, and it comes from the theatre world. Concord acquired the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization in 2017, and Imogen Lloyd Webber, an EVP at Concord Theatricals who oversees the R&H brand, told Vanity Fair the company is ready to help – saying Concord stands “at the ready to support Hollywood Records, our partners at Disney, and all involved in this project to finally get the soundtrack released.”
Meron, for his part, says the finished album exists and that he personally has a copy, which he has since passed along to Concord. Cinderella turns 30 on November 2, 2027.
