Dawnstar

My trains are stopping slightly earlier on 9th anyway, due to overnight engineering, so the 23.09 is the last one before rail replacement buses kick in. It's last minute cancellations due to staff shortages that I'm most nervous about as if the 23.09 got cancelled & I had to get the rail replacement buses I'd not get home until 2am. I feel exactly the same. I've already got 3 weekends in May with no trains due to engineering & now a week of strikes on top of that.

I'm very hacked off at the latest strike dates as I was planning to see Winter's Tale on 7th May, which I now definitely won't be able to get to, and Swan Lake on 9th May, which might now be problematic. I suppose I'll have to see that Winter's Tale cast on 13th May instead but I can't reschedule SL as on the other date that cast are performing I have no trains due to engineering. (I'm also worrying because with there being strikes on similar dates in April & May if it's the same in June then that'll be just when Sarasota Ballet is visiting the ROH & if I can't get to their performances that I have booked I will be extremely upset.)

No, she first danced it on 1st April & has done it several times since. I think last night was the first time she was partnered with Acri though. There seems to be a lot of mixing up of pairings in the Neopolitan this season. I think both pieces of fabric were ribbons from the Neopolitan costumes but while Acri removed one as he left the stage the other one stayed there until Harris Bell retrieved it after the Czardas. Sorry, I don't currently have the mental energy to comment properly on last night's performance but I just want to say that, given I regrettably don't usually find Swan Lake moving, last night I was pleasantly surprised to find that towards the end of Act IV Odette's gesture that she had to now die & Siegfried's reaction to it made tears spring to my eyes. Further to the quite extensive discussions on the ending of the RB's production & how the sidelining of Siegfried is problematic, it occurred to me after watching it again last night that it could possibly be improved by making the relatively small change of, rather than Siegfried be knocked out by Von Rothbart before Odette runs to the rock & throws herself off, have Siegfried struggle desparately with Von Rothbart as Odette runs to the rock so he sees what she is doing, then Von Rothbart knocks him out as Odette jumps off. That way it would, at least for me, I think be more moving because we would get more emotion from Siegfried, plus it would make more sense as to how he knows where to go to retrive Odette's body.

Yesterday evening someone near me, though I wasn't certain who, did a bit of humming during Siegfried's solo at the start of Act II & Odette's solo later in the same act. I found myself thinking that there's a distinct advantage to less well-known ballet scores, given some people seem to hum along when they recognise music.

For me the difference in sound is not enough to justify the difference in cost & travel time. But then I'm not an audiophile. For productions I do want to see I abandond the amphitheatre years ago in favour of the side stalls circle because I prioritise being able to see the acting over the sound quality.

There is a Royal Ballet Twitter account but the last time anything was posted was nearly a year ago. Now it's only the Royal Opera House account that posts regularly. So they definitely seem to be pushing the venue as a whole rather than either of the two artforms that share it. Well, I say two artforms but based on their posts they seem to think they also host a third artform: catering!

I'm puzzled by the description of the house as "crumbling". I thought that the reason the family took in boarders was because a decent house was their only asset at the time. I can't believe they would have attracted several boarders of professional social standing if the house had been falling to bits! I've always imagined it as a solid, probably Victorian, townhouse.

Teo Dubreuil as Benno tonight. I think his debut? It'll make a change from seeing him doubling Von Rothbart anyway! (I'd hoped I might get to see one of the new Von Rothbarts tonight, but no.)

And the way (non-offer) ticket prices have risen in the last few seasons I can't afford to do either even if I wanted to!

I've not had any offers for Lucia either, even though I did as suggested in the discussion about who did/didn't receive offers for the MacMillan Triple & changed my email preferences. Since then I keep on getting emails exhorting me to dine in the ROH restaurant or buy gifts in the ROH shop but no ticket offers. Given I've been seeing opera at the ROH for 20 years but in the last few years I've been to a lot more ballet than opera, and I've never seen their Lucia production, I would have thought the ROH would consider me a prime target for ticket offers to try to get me to increase my opera viewing again, but evidently they disagree.

I'm one of those people who is put off seeing this production by the blood. I don't see the point of getting a listening-only seat though. It's much easier & cheaper to listen to a CD or radio broadcast.

Masquerade at the Wells is probably the book you're thinking of.

My local Picturehouse typically starts encore screenings at 1.45pm and they finish around 5pm, depending of course on the length of the piece, so that would be a very long lunch hour! The audience is usually almost all of retired age. While I didn't actually check particularly, I didn't notice anyone other than myself at this afternoon's triple bill encore screening who looked to be under retirement age. (At least I hope I look under retirement age given I'm 38!) Comparing seeing the 3 pieces on screen to live, I thought Different Drummer was improved by the close ups while the other two I found fairly similar. I didn't find the picture too dark, though it's always a bit darker on screen than live. The sound glitches in Danses Concertantes were still present, making Stravinsky sound rather more avant garde than he intended! After reading the reports on here about Saturday's performance, I watched the Libra Me & In Paradisum trying to work out how they could be performed minus one of the leading male dancers & couldn't work it out.

@alison Oh dear. I've just had a look at the National Rail website & there are trees down on half a dozen lines so I hope whichever your is is one of the ones that has been fixed & services have restarted rather than one of the ones that still has no trains. I'm very glad I only saw ballet at the cinema this afternoon as it doesn't look like I would have made it down this evening.

Gosh, that's unfortunate for Hirano to have to retire injured during his last performance of the season. I hope it's not a different, new injury in addition to the one he's already been nursing.

Oh dear, that sounds rather ominous. I hope everyone is alright.

I hope he'll recover by next Saturday. Partly for his own sake but also because it'd be tough on Lamb if she had to re-rehearse SL with a third partner. Are you referring to the Different Drummer cast changes or did something happen during the performance?

I've realised that Donnelly is on the cast list for Requiem so that makes it very unlikely that the cast change is anything to do with him.

In terms of Siegfried not having as much to do as he could, apart from the ending the other part that annoys me is that he doesn't get a solo as part of the Act II pdd. I would much rather he had a solo either just before or just after Odette's & cut out the swans who occupy that space (in fact if I had a free hand with Swan Lake I'd be cutting out a lot of swans in general!). Though I assume that one is down to Tchaikovsky or Petipa or both rather than Scarlett.

I wonder if she would have continued dancing for longer if she had become a Principal? I only ever saw her in one leading role, The Cellist, & a few smaller roles, as she was replaced on a couple of other occasions when I should have seen her in larger roles. I gather she had various injury issues.

I'd be very surprised if it was due to Donnelly being tired, given as you say Sambe is likely to be more tired! One of the 3 leads being either taken ill or injured seems a more likely reason for a last-minute swap, with the complex partnering requiring all 3 to be swapped. Rather surprisingly the cast changes aren't marked as such on the cast sheet, which is now up. https://static.roh.org.uk/digital/cast-sheets/MacMillan-Celebrated-Cast-Sheet-13-04-24.pdf

O'Sullivan & Takada danced Alice in the last run so will presumably be cast this time too if both have recovered from their current injuries. Choe danced the role in each of the previous runs but will presumably still be on maternity leave, given the run will evidently be early in the season (I doubt it'll get a split run as that only seems to be for the most popular ballets). The only other past Alice I can find listed is Stix-Brunnell.

Unfortunately far from getting used to it I'm the other way round. The ending is irritating me a lot more this time around than during the last run because in the meantime I've seen ENB's production, whose ending (once I got over my initial surprise at Siegfried foillowing Odette off the rock) I much preferred. I liked the Siegfrieds that did that in the last run. At least it seemed as though he'd been knocked out by Von Rothbart with major force so there was a good reason why he was lying there for ages. When he just collapses gently to the floor at a mere wave of Von Rothbart's wing & lies there for ages I unfortunately feel it makes him look pretty pathetic. Gosh, that had never occurred to me. I just thought they were waking him up to tell him it's all over & he needs to go & fish Odette's dead body out of the lake!

I've just spotted that the ROH website has been changed in the last hour or so to show a complete cast swap for tonight's Different Drummer with Sambe, Hayward & Serrano replacing Ospiova, Clarke & Donnelly.

I'e only seen Alice on video so I do want to see it live but I think once or twice is likely to be sufficient, unless there's lots of extremely tempting casting. There were some scenes that I did not enjoy, and that's the actual content so I won't enjoy them any more live, especially the Duchess, Cook & sausages which I could hardly bear to watch. I wasn't keen on the Mad Hatter's tea pary either, which seems to be a highlight for many people. I wonder if Cinderella is likely to have a Nutcrackeresque number of performances? If so then I suppose there could be quite a lot of new casts so that might make me want to see more performances. Otherwise then, as I saw 6 casts in 2022, I hope to be able to save some money! Sleeping Beauty overlapped with Coppelia in 2019/20 so perhaps it's that you're thinking of rather than the Nutcracker?