Geoff

This is really interesting Amelia, thank you. May I cross post this on the Cinderella thread so more people can watch it?

The Times has this report today: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/theatre-staff-may-exit-stage-left-over-bad-audiences-5x3lg95km?shareToken=ee32128ebac1c3a640d0622d137f89a4

Thanks for posting this. Whatever one thinks of Macaulay’s judgements (I agree with some and not with others) it is certainly useful to have more of the historical context.

You’re not wrong Candleque. In, I would suggest, two ways, one of which will be easier to talk about once the show is public. It is simple biographical fact that Petipa was Ashton’s choreographic hero. There is a famous story - sourced in David Vaughan’s book - of Ashton saying that he would slip away to watch Sleeping Beauty whenever he could “for a private lesson”. Ashton intended aspects of Cinderella to be recognised by audiences as his homage to Petipa’s greatest work. The other reason you felt a resemblance is, I believe, because of aspects of how this particular production has been mounted. In other words, this is not so much a marketing question as one of design, staging and production (you might like now to watch a recording of the earlier production and see what you think) In any case let’s come back to this aspect when we are free to discuss it.

What to expect? From a new Handel production? In my experience of Handel on stage, we could be in for absolutely anything. Here is one source of intelligence for playing guessing games: https://www.roh.org.uk/people/mathilda-du-tillieul-mcnicol

Indeed. I believe I heard screams, not just at the end.

Indeed! But isn’t it more fun to leave the images as a quiz for those who want to play a guessing game? If you send me a PM I’ll give you the answer - but I suspect Forum world (even without cheating with Google) can post solutions from memory.

Yes, absolutely no East German brothels, public lavatorys, basements, Nazis, rifles, rapes, hangings, or other such tired interpolations. As it’s a rehearsal we can‘t discuss what is in the show but we can say what’s not in it. And at this point, in the first interval, I am willing to bet that no part will be set on a spaceship or in a pool of stagnant water. If you‘ve been wavering because of fears of ugly modernism, just grab some tickets and go.

And my personal all-time favourite —

ROH marketing discussion, as elsewhere on the Forum, part 453. Just for fun I snapped some old Royal Ballet posters that they clearly like enough to display at the ROH. I cut off obvious identification so that one can view them perhaps more objectively, here they are for the purposes of comparison, comment and review (apologies for separate images, I am not skilled enough to post a slide show)

And of course usually available (forever?) on whatever the BBC Radio online service is called now.

I was put into the waiting room only last week (while trying to book a Friends rehearsal ticket) Admittedly this was the same booking morning when a lot of people who had yet to book any tickets were told they had reached their booking limit (as discussed on the Forum) The machinery was perhaps having an off day.

+100 Can’t say that often enough. In subsidised houses (however “poor”) the inept, the incompetent and the simply stupid can find it easier to get a job and to stay in that job and (oh dear) even get promoted, despite a record of failure. It all depends on how “success” is defined. Seats sold is not necessarily the only or most important metric - that I agree with - but gosh, how much bad stuff slips by under that cover.

3pm

That’s really interesting, thank you, Does the original text make clear if Ratmansky meant “impossible” in relation to the work or to the conditions at the theatre, politics or other externalities?

Yup, me too. After lots of excitement this was eventually sorted by 9.15 - but I am wondering, not for the first time, why I pay extra money for early booking when the system finds it so hard to deliver. This after all follows *years* of complaining about the website. You'd have thought they might have expected people to try and buy tickets this morning and so prepared themselves. Crinkly sulky mouth emoji.

My parents had extracts of the Cinderella music on 78s so I grew up listening to it. Always loved it and can hardly wait for the run to start.

Has anyone tried to find the old material via the Wayback Machine? This is an amazing tool that can recover much of what used to be online: https://archive.org A short introduction: https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/23/defining-web-pages-web-sites-and-web-captures/

For the avoidance of doubt, as lawyers like to say, Fonty’s remark is an in-joke. I better not spell it out in case my fingers run away with me and I write something I shouldn’t. But the report of this delightfully daffy explanation is on here somewhere…

+1 (See past discussions here on the Royal Ballet conducting this work at speeds Tchaikovsky and Petipa would not recognise, which started coming in during the 1980s and is still not back to where it should be)

What an appallingly stupid, incomplete and disingenuous reply. I wonder if they will now send something similar in response to my own list of complaints? However I don’t think too much blame should attach to the hapless author of the miserable missive you received. It clearly comes from a junior member of staff, no doubt ill trained, underpaid and thoughtlessly replying without getting sign off from senior management. Not untypical of the arts, where in my professional experience low-grade but complacent people fill far too many positions of authority. Might I make a suggestion? It seems worth your sending the note you got (along with your comment) to someone in authority, to ask if they agree with this alleged “policy” being so baldly expressed, one benefit claimed that nonetheless is at the cost of others’ enjoyment. But who to send their reply on to? We are currently being encouraged to “save” the ENO (who own and run the Coliseum), despite it having been astonishingly poorly led for at least the last ten years. So I’m torn as to where to send it. The ENO Chairman who has presided over their recent disastrous era is a Harley Street doctor and medical entrepreneur called Harry Brunjes. Dr Brunjes can be reached via the ENO but my hunch would be to write to someone slightly less implicated in the current state of the house, and more distanced from the day to day running and so better able to take an objective point of view, the ENO President Sir Vernon Ellis. Sir Vernon is a former ENO Chair himself, a philanthropist who has helped restore the Coliseum. He can be reached here (this information is public, by the way, from the Charity Commission documents they have posted online): vernon@vernonellis.net