ORLANDO, Fla. — Let’s start with the good news about the musical “Diana,” onstage at Theater West End in Sanford. The theater’s production features strong singers, fun and effective choreography and gorgeous costumes.

But the show itself? It’s more of a hot mess than the mercurial marriage between Charles, now Britain’s king, and the former Diana Spencer, who died in a 1997 Paris car crash. To add insult to injury, it’s subtitled “A True Musical Story.” Well, it’s “true” enough — if you want to believe a specific narrative.

Joe DiPietro and David Bryan, the creative team behind the Tony-winning musical “Memphis,” created this show, perhaps while on a drunken bender. It ran for just 33 performances on Broadway and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has never had a professional production in the United Kingdom.

In their musical, DiPietro and Bryan seemingly want to present Diana as a hero. Yet onstage she is warned that Charles’ great love is Camilla Parker Bowles, finds the stuffy life Charles leads boring, finds that they have nothing in common, endures a pathetic marriage proposal — and then waltzes down the aisle anyway.

Perhaps we should empathize with her over this mess of her own making, but one could also feel sympathetic toward the plight of the future King Charles III and Queen Camilla, deeply in love but kept apart by tradition and circumstance.

Whatever the case, there aren’t really any dramatic stakes in play or any actual reasons to care about these mostly one-note characters. So without drama, are we meant to laugh at these people’s pain? They are actual humans, after all — a fact underscored by director and designer Derek Critzer’s decision to splash photos of the characters’ real-life counterparts behind his actors. It just ups the ick factor.

And while the paparazzi are painted as villains for trying to make a buck off Diana’s fame, how hypocritical is that when this musical is essentially doing the same thing? It might be justified if the show had something to say about life or the world — like “Evita,” for example. But despite the obvious lessons to be learned about choices, the stifling power of institutions and the cost of fame, this show ignores them and fails to provide any insight, fresh angle or food for thought.

So what does “Diana” offer?

Well, as I stated at the start of this column, there are definitely bright spots in Theater West End’s production work. Critzer’s costume design is gorgeous and delightfully on point. He evokes Diana’s signature dresses, captures Queen Elizabeth’s staid elegance and lets Camilla dress with establishment propriety.

Christopher Payen’s choreography is fun and particularly shines in big group numbers. The paparazzi circle Diana like predators trapping their prey. The bored elite at a party sniff and snark their way around the stage and the audience. The public mob devouring the salacious, Diana-fueled tell-all book explodes with intensity.

The singing is great as well, both from the soloists and the ensemble, who make Bryan’s serviceable but bland pop score sound better than it deserves to.

Sarah Isola is a powerful Diana, whose face conveys occasional fragility even when the tepid script doesn’t. Brian Keith Graziani makes Charles romantic, though not with his wife, but also a mix of frustration and anger over his situation.

Laurel Hatfield makes Camilla the most fully formed character. She’s lovestruck but pragmatic, cordial but fierce. She also takes the lead on one of the show’s couple of memorable songs, “I Miss You Most on Sundays,” and makes it soar.

As Queen Elizabeth II, Kelley Mauro gets another of the good ones, “An Officer’s Wife,” and she delivers — though she plays the queen as so cold that her sudden burst of kindness is jarring. Mauro has more fun as frilly romance novelist Barbara Cartland, played for laughs. Also scoring in the comic category with his boisterous entrance song: Easton J. Curtis as James Hewitt, Diana’s lover.

At play’s end, with voiceovers reporting the news of Diana’s death, the abrupt shift in emotional gears feels absurd and more than a little tacky. Are we really now paying some sort of pseudo-respect to a woman whose tragic life we’ve just been consuming for entertainment? Maybe that’s the message of this ill-conceived show: What does it say about us?

‘Diana’

• Length: 2:20, including intermission

• Where: Theater West End, 115 W. 1st St. in Sanford

• When: Through Aug. 2

• Cost: $28 and up

• Info: theaterwestend.com

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