RuthE

They won't even try to resell them unless the seating area and price range in question is already sold out.

If and when they do resell, what normally happens is you receive an email the day after the performance to confirm the value of the credit that will be made to your account (though you can phone them sooner, and ask if the resale has been made).

You may well find it's best to advertise them on the Ticket Exchange/Special Offers forum here, especially if they are inexpensive and good, as you may find a willing buyer sooner rather than later, and without the uncertainty of whether or not the ROH will resell them.

Just announced: Sonya Yoncheva will be the ROH's Norma. Quite unexpected, I would say!

I'm with you, Scheherezade... I was hoping for Devia too. (I hope you're aware of her upcoming Wigmore Hall/Rosenblatt recital.)

I think the shoes are the right colour for the doll... but the doll not only doesn't look like Misty Copeland, it doesn't really look black at all...

THAT would seem to be the bigger "missed opportunity"...

Hurrah!  I must have caught them in the act of uploading it all...

I don't know the piece, other than what's been discussed here and at the In Rehearsal event last week, but this looks like two lovely casts (and assuming that the second cast will dance the dress rehearsal, it appears that I will get to see both of them without any changes to my plans).

I just happened to look on the show page for The Invitation, and the cast for the first night only is now showing.

http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-invitation-by-kenneth-macmillan

I saw it in Hackney on the first night of the run and thought it was one of the best Don Giovannis I've ever seen.  You may not have seen quite the same cast as there are several double-castings.

I'm surprised you say there were no surtitles - are you sure?  There were the night I went (ETO use screens attached to the sides of the proscenium).  You're not the first person to say they weren't there - Richard Morrison's review in the Times said so too, and he was there the same night as me!  But he was sitting at the back of the stalls so it's quite possible he had a restricted view of them, or simply that production and English diction were so good that they kept the eye always drawn to the stage.  But I can assure you that in Hackney at least, they were there - I can even tell you who was operating them.

I have just received an email from ENO announcing the appointment of Daniel Kramer as their new Artistic Director.

I know something of his stage work (Punch & Judy, Bluebeard) and he's directing the upcoming Tristan and Isolde, but I know nothing of his credentials as a leader.

Any thoughts?

They aren't always, NYCbird. There are many ballets that we haven't had for years: Sylvia, Ondine, Bayadere, just to name three full-lengthers. We usually have two or three seasons between Filles, but I am thinking that part of the reason for its revival next season is so that Roberta Marquez, one of the best Lises ever (IMHO) can come back and say a proper goodbye to the company and audience she served so well. The other reason, of course, is that it is totally fab and enduringly popular!

It's not THAT long since Bayadere - it was last on just before the last Mayerling, in 2013.  But Sylvia and Ondine haven't been done at all by the RB since I started attending regularly in 2011.

Yes, the sound of a handbag zip going back and forth would be distracting, along with rummaging and muttering. Sometimes even more so if the person is trying to unzip the bag slowly, under the mistaken impression that makes less noise, if they are even considering the noise at all. It makes you want to turn round and say for god's sake, just open the bag, take out what you want, put the bag away and be quiet!!   

Also, why on earth - once the bag is unzipped - don't people just leave it unzipped for the rest of the act so they can get back into it again if necessary without making more noise?

Thank you! Very helpful.

Quick question, to which I'm sure people will not all have the same answer.

If I booked for two Don Quixotes before I knew the casting, but now know I only want to go to one, would the more appealing cast to keep be Krysanova/Chudin or Shipulina/Ovcharenko? I'm pretty sure the only one of these dancers I've seen in anything at all before is Chudin...

I'm wondering if it's something to do with co-ordinating the scheduling of rehearsals and performances for the mixed bill. Perhaps they've finalised some of the casting for The Invitation and found some people were meant to be in two places at once, or dancing practically every night?

I'm afraid this is another concert rather than a staging, but Scottish Opera have just announced that they will perform Le villi next year as part of their Sunday-afternoon concert series in Glasgow:

https://www.scottishopera.org.uk/our-operas/our-operas/16-17/the-sunday-series-1617

I'm working on the basis that having booked for the dress rehearsal (which is on the same day as opening night) and a performance later in the run which has the first-night cast for the other pieces, I'm reasonably likely to end up with two different casts.

Last night I attended the Royal Ballet In Rehearsal event, in which Mayara Magri, Nicol Edmonds and Fernando Montano were coached on the cock & hens [edited - sorry, I mean "cocks & hen"] dance from The Invitation.  The question about casting of the principal roles was asked.  Apparently they are still in the process of working out the most suitable dancers, in something of a workshop environment (which, Jonathan Howells said, is not normal practice at all, but he stressed the importance of choosing suitable dancers for the piece).  He implied that there were around four dancers currently under consideration for each of the leading roles, and that it would probably end up being narrowed down to two casts, not necessarily based on seniority of rank.

That's funny - I have the same reaction if I ever go to church, I've always put it down to musty old hymn books and pollen from the flower arrangements

Speaking as a professional church/choral singer, incense can be dreadful for that!  It can really catch you in the throat.  And invariably, the higher the feast (which usually correlates with quantity and complexity of the music!) the more noxious the chosen incense blend, and the more liberally it's swung around!

Also, lilies...

I attended the dress rehearsal too, and I tend to agree.  I'm not much of a fan of the piece (though I like most other Wagner) and I enjoyed it much more than I ever have before (and it felt shorter).  I do have reservations about the production, however; clean and uncluttered it may be, but I find it very static (it was designed around Johan Botha and his inability to move much on stage - I think even if he lost half his body weight he still wouldn't be one of the profession's natural actors!)

Botha is, however, a spectacularly good singer, and I don't think Peter Seiffert is going to be vocally as memorable as Botha was - not that a firm judgement on that can be made on the basis of a dress rehearsal.  I hope I might get to go again later in the run.

Does anyone have any experience of the theatre, seating, views and legroom-wise? I've only ever sat in rear stalls.

My friend recalls attending a rock concert there, sitting towards the front of the Circle and feeling like he was miles from the stage.

We've just booked front row stalls for a midweek preview - £52 each, which we thought seemed very reasonable for something like this.

I should have said in my earlier post: I think it has a lot more historic precedent in Italy, though not recently.  And I have no idea whether it happens regularly in Vienna - I would have thought not.

In twenty years of primarily UK-based operagoing, I've never known it happen.

(Operetta has different traditions, and encores are often pre-planned into the performance for comic purposes.  For example, in HMS Pinafore there is a well-established tradition of spinning "Never mind the why and wherefore" out to several iterations as a visual joke gets developed further and further.)

So he repeated E lucevan le stelle? Is that common practice on the operatic stage? What about in ballet? The only time I can think of is at the first performance of Ashton's gala piece Meditation from Thaïs when to Sibley and Dowell's horror Ashton asked the audience if they'd like to see it again.

It is very rare in opera to pause the piece for an encore; it's supposed to be continuous drama after all.  Tenor Javier Camarena has had it happen twice recently at the Met - once in La Cenerentola and once in Don Pasquale - and in doing so, became only the third singer in the history of the Met ever to give an encore during an opera, and the first ever to do so on two separate occasions.

The previous two had been Luciano Pavarotti and Juan Diego Florez.  There's obviously something about high tenors giving amazing displays of technical virtuosity that wakes up the Met audience...

It was so unusual that it even made the news in the Daily Mail.

The other annoying thing at SW is the fact that they have one of the clearest mobile-phone announcements in London (something like "Please ensure your phone is completely turned off, as the light is distracting to others") so people can't even say they weren't told. They JUST don't give a sh*t.

I have to say am getting less and less sympathetic to people who commit such a public suicide by jumping onto railway lines ....even though I'm sure they've all got some good reason or other. I had some quite evil thoughts I must say which won't air here but this seems to be happening more and more often and causes at the least very annoying and sometimes more serious disruption to people's plans for the day.

Well, I'm sure the majority of people in this situation are "not in their right mind" even if in context of what they are doing, they are thinking and planning very clearly.

You know who I *really* have no sympathy with? People who end up getting hit by trains through sheer stupidity.  Drivers that get stuck on level crossings because they just didn't think is was an issue to make a dash for it as the barriers come down.  Or, as once happened somewhere further down the line when I was travelling from Waterloo to Guildford to see my newborn nephew in hospital, some berk who dropped their mobile phone on the track, decided to climb down to retrieve it, and got hit by a train.  They survived, too. Here was I thinking that's the sort of thing that evolution takes care of by weeding complete idiots out of the gene pool.

The impression I got - which quite possibly could have been the wrong one - was that the shadows behind the curtains represented both Jason/Creusa ('the Princess') and Medea's children, so that in killing Jason/Creusa, Medea was also killing the children. The problem with that possibly wrong interpretation is that Jason, as I said before, isn't killed by Medea, Medea had two sons etc. etc. The killing of Creusa was perfectly correct though. The only other thing I guess that might have happened, which may have been what you saw, Coated, was the shadows behind the curtains representing Creusa and her father, who is also killed in Euripides' play. But in that case they really should have set up the father as a character, because it looked like it was Jason behind the curtain, and the problem with the gender of the children remains. 

And on that note I'm going to stop arguing, because I really did enjoy the first half of M-Dao, and it seems unfair to focus too exclusively on the negative side of my opinion. Every stubborn thing I say is to uphold the name of Euripides! I apologise. 

That was exactly my interpretation, too, and I personally didn't feel it lacked clarity at all, though my sightline wasn't ideal (I was in the front row, so I had trouble seeing the bundles of white silk on the floor).

I was there on Saturday night and so it was Erina Takahashi I saw in M-Dao.  She is not a ballerina I was really familiar with, as I haven't been attending ballet for that long, don't see as many multiple cast combinations at ENB as I do at the RB, and when ENB does a full-length and the principals are split across several casts I always shamelessly pick Tamara! Anyway, on the basis of Saturday night I was blown away by the emotional intensity of Takahashi's performance and massively fell in love with her, even if the piece itself isn't one I'd go out of my way to see again.

Absolutely loved Broken Wings and wish I could have seen it more than once - preferably once more with Tamara and once with Begona Cao who is a dancer my eye is always drawn to - as others have said, she has the most amazingly expressive face and eyes.  I thought she was great in the supporting role in the first cast, but I can't actually visualise her in the lead role (just because she's so physically different from Tamara) so I would have liked to go along and fill in that gap in my imagination - I'm certain the deficiency is in my mind, not in her dramatic range!

Fantastic Beings was very enjoyable too - the low lighting levels didn't bother me as much as they did some, but I didn't really understand the animal costumes - I thought it would have worked just as well if they'd all just continued wearing the shiny petrol-blue unitards.

What is wrong with using the words "wardrobe malfunction" when talking in general terms about costume mishaps? I have seen several over the years, and it has never bothered me as a member of the audience.

I thought I remembered where this term originated, so I checked with Wikipedia and I was right...

The term is credited as having been coined by singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, on February 1, 2004, to explain the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy; the controversy is in reference to Jackson's right breast having been bared.^[8] Timberlake apologized for the incident, stating he was "sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance of the Super Bowl...."^[9] The term wardrobe malfunction appeared in numerous stories in major US consumer and business publications, newspapers, and major TV and radio broadcasts.^[10] Journalist Eric Alterman described the incident as "the most famous 'wardrobe malfunction' since Lady Godiva."^[11]

I would like to see Yasmine Naghdi and Beatriz Stix-Brunell join Frankie Hayward as First Soloists.

When I said I can think of few of the current crop of Soloists who are immediately ready for promotion, those two were who I had in mind as the exceptions.  Fumi Kaneko maybe not far behind?  But I doubt they have two or more female First Soloist positions to make available at this stage... until somebody gets promoted to Principal, decides to retire etc.  Frankie Hayward must have filled the vacancy in First Soloist ranks left by Deirdre Chapman.  In my head, until they give a Principal promotion to an existing First Soloist, the most likely vacancy to be created at FS level is if Melissa Hamilton decides she's not coming back from Dresden after all.

(edited for clarity: we already know Hamilton is taking another year out, but that position is only vacant if she decides to leave for good...)