Geoff

3 minutes ago, Odyssey said:

Geoff, what is the production of the final poster pic you posted? It’s quite mesmerising.

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.

2 minutes ago, Sim said:

Well….so far, so fabulous!!  

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)

55 minutes ago, LinMM said:

You can find Last Word in the 4-4.30 slot on Fridays on BBC sounds. I have a feeling it’s also repeated every Sunday at 8.30pm. 

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

1 hour ago, art_enthusiast said:

the ROH no longer puts users through the waiting room ridiculousness - at least not in my recent experience.

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. 

1 hour ago, bridiem said:

Well, all I can say is that as with so much of the ROH's marketing, it's just weird.

+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.

2 hours ago, alison said:

There is a matinee of some sort, isn't there?

3pm

1 hour ago, MaddieRose said:

I won't translate the whole thing, but some key parts are: 

 

'Ratmansky said that it was impossible, that he could not continue to work on the production. This was in Spring 2022'. 
 

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/

1 hour ago, Fonty said:

Is that because the stage is so much bigger now, Geoff?  

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 hour ago, JNC said:

I think I’d prefer the tempo to be a little faster. 

+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) 

3 hours ago, Balletbloke said:

I finally received an answer to my email to the Coliseum regarding people eating and drinking during the performance of Swan Lake. Here's the relevent reply:

"As an entertainment venue, we allow both drinks and snacks inside the auditorium. We are firm in the belief that being allowed to eat and drink whilst watching performances enhances one's enjoyment. There is no rush before the start of the performance or in the interval, and customers can take their time over the drink or snack they have. Furthermore, there may be medical or other reasons why a customer must eat or drink during a performance. By allowing anyone to take food and drink inside the auditorium, we are mitigating against this being a problem."

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

Just a quick report after tonight’s (excellent) Noises Off in the West End. House pretty much sold out, diverse audience, a wide variation in ages etc. 
 

Drinks and snacks allowed in the auditorium. No obvious messages about phones. The show as usual worked the crowd into a frenzy of loud joy (notably more than usual in Act 3, which has been tweaked).

Yet despite my best efforts, I could find no bad behaviour of any kind. No phones on, no slurping or talking etc. Concentration, waves of laughter and cheers at the end.

How well an audience can behave if…(fill in the space).

This one is marginally better constructed than the first but still contains some basic howlers (eg mutually exclusive options that ignore people’s actual behaviour). 

Nonetheless the exercise may be helpful in some ways, let’s hope so. However, and above all, it is very sad that none of their latest questions (unless I missed something) are aimed at anything other than getting more money from Friends. What about our many years of experience, knowledge, enthusiasm? Our demonstrable commitment to the arts of opera and ballet? Surely what is these days known as “human capital” could also benefit the ROH, not just our cash? 
 

It is short-sighted to see Friends only as a resource to be squeezed for more money, rather than also to help support the institution in other ways (eg spreading the word, attracting new and future audiences and so on). One suspects only “marketing” types were involved, rather than those with real experience of strategic business development.   
 

Another view:

https://boulezian.blogspot.com/2023/03/rusalka-royal-opera-27-february-2023.html

In response to some uncritical comments in another thread about this new show, it seems only fair to point out that, as ever, other opinions are available. For example here is a tweet from a long-serving opera critic:

My view, fwiw? Go if you already love this work. The orchestra play exceptionally well under a remarkable conductor and the singing is first rate. 
 

But if you do not know or do not like this opera, then this is not the production to convince you. The staging is clumsy, bordering on the amateurish, while hoping to hide its incompetence behind a contemporary “message”. Caring about the planet - which as it happens I already did before seeing this show - does not excuse awful sets, costumes, choreography and staging (never mind perhaps the worst “dancing” I have ever seen on a professional stage). 
 

Caveat emptor.

Thanks Emeralds, that is exactly my point. As I wrote on Friday:

>>I am not really talking primarily about dancers. I am talking about who trains them,  who teaches the roles and who stages the works (after all one can’t make a mime gesture or action musical if one has not been taught it as part of the work in the first place).

The Giselle research quoted above shows how detailed 19th century productions must have been, every single bar, so it seems sad that attempts are not made to honour this tradition. My hunch is that productions would be more energetic, more complex and therefore more interesting as a result.  

By way of illustration - and to provide a little more detail to my earlier comment about the Sleeping Beauty Prologue - I watched the performance at Covent Garden this Saturday evening. The curtain (or rather curtains, as there is also a scrim) went up at points bearing little resemblance to what the music suggests. More importantly, the opening section (I kept careful note of everything up to the arrival of the king and queen) has only a few beats of "mime" as understood by the Royal Ballet these days. But there is still a lot going on in the music, though there is now not so much happening on the stage and it is not really connected to the score. 

Much of what was going on seemed to be happening at the same time as the music rather than in time with the music.  It's only a guess (we don't have the missing violin score from the 1890s that Wiley examined forty years ago and which may have given detail of what's expected) but on the face of it there seems to be a lot of "text" missing now.

>>I didn't think the PNB's mime looked quite as natural.

Might I ask your view of how musical you found the mime? I ask because of this related discussion elsewhere on the Forum:

https://www.balletcoforum.com/topic/27071-music-and-action-in-classical-ballet-performance/