AMG Review of Once Upon a Time...

Michael Freedberg
All Music Guide

Donna Summer and her liberators have created one audience and redefined another, and this record's four sides of dream worlds without end sometimes manipulate each audience. The candy-girl music of "Fairy Tale High," "Queen for a Day," and "If You Got It Flaunt It" explicitly recognizes her newly created gay audience, a daring acknowledgement coming from a mainstream pop star. As for her redefined audience of naïve young things who live in the suburbs and dream of romance, adventure, and sex while they search for identity, Summer works her music into a true-to-life Cinderella story staged as four acts of impatient pulse, delirious space noise, wish-upon-a-star voice monologues, and motion.