Dawnstar

Well, it could be if they accidentally price the tickets more cheaply than intended when they finally go online. Back in December I was doing Friday rush for the Nutcracker & found tickets that should have been £64 had been put on sale for only £48! Someone had evidently put them online at the wrong price.

I may have just succumbed to temptation & snapped up a seat for tomorrow evening....!

I wouldn't say I only see ENB for Frola but if I can only see one cast in a production then I'll book for his cast. It's not just the cost of seeing more than one cast but that most of ENB's runs are so short that seeing more than one or at most two performances is difficult. It's actually worked out pretty well in terms of seeing a variety of ENB's female dancers over the last few years, as I've seen him with McWhinney (Manon), Hawes (Cinderella), Takahashi (Corsaire & Cinderella), Oliveira (Raymonda) and Conway (Nutcracker), plus the guesting Salenko in Swan Lake. On the subject of guesting, I wonder who Summerscales will partner when she returns. I'd be interested in seeing her, as I've not seen her dance before since she had left ENB before I first saw them in recent years.

I was wondering that, having looked up all the incoming dancers up on the Semperoper Ballett Dresden website & seen a photo of them together. Basically I'm wondering if she's short enough to partner Frola, because if she's too tall for him then I probably won't be seeing a lot of her!

I'm afraid I'd not heard of her before. Do you know what sort of height she is? I'm wondering who she may be partnered with.

While I'm not surprised to see dancers accompanying Aaron Watkins from Dresden, I am surprised that the only dancer coming in at Lead Principal level is female. Surely it's male top level dancers that ENB needs more than female ones? With Hawes & Arrieta's promotions they now have 6 female Lead Principals, plus one female Principal, but only 2 male Lead Principals & no male Principals. At least Trossello has got a promotion but given he's danced the male lead in all 3 ballets this season I still think he should have been brought in at First Soloist level.

I'd prefer to see them on the cast sheet, so those of us who haven't forked out for the programme (were they really £12 or did I mis-over-hear?) can still see who they were.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who couldn't tell the Fates apart. It didn't help that I was unable to get hold of a cast sheet until the first interval but even when I found out who they were, and that they were all dancers who I should be able to recognise as I've seen them all in solo roles in the past, I still couldn't tell who was who.

After queuing for so long beforehand that I was getting twitchy about being late (though I'm sure the "performance starts in x minutes" warnings weren't actually accurate), in the two intervals after seeing how long the queues were for the stalls loos I went up a couple of levels & found some loos with no queues. I seem to recall I've done the same in the past too.

Oh yes, I was unpleasantly surprised on Friday how many latecomers were let in and for how long. There were still people coming in when the Prince in disguise arrived at Cinderella's house, which must be at least 20 minutes in. With the in the round staging it's even more distracting than in a normal proscenium theatre. I also saw a few people going out during the performance, which with the dancers using the audience entrances made me worry in case they got tangled up! As with ENB's January Coliseum performances, the presence of popcorn came as an unpleasant surprise. It feels like I'm never going to be able to see ENB without the unpleasant smell of popcorn in the air! Does the RAH now have popcorn for all performances? What about the Proms?! @Emeralds That's nice of you to say but right now I feel devoid of anything useful to say!

She tweeted a few days ago that she was rehearsing for one of Roberto Bolle's Italian shows so perhaps she's been allowed to do that rather than dance in Japan. I guess she wouldn't have been allowed to do Juliet even if she was there, as I understand the Japanese promoters want Principals in the lead roles, so I can imagine dancing in Italy might appeal more than going all the way to Japan to only dance minor roles.

I enjoyed the view more yesterday. I'm not sure the show itself was either any better or worse than in 2019. (I think I preferred Hawes's Cinderella to Takahashi's but that's just personal preference.) I did, I think, watch the show differently yesterday because I was watching it in the light of having seen 6 performance's of Ashton's Cinderella in April, whereas in 2019 I'd never seen any ballet version of Cinderella before. I think Ashton is better choreographically overall but I do like Wheeldon's use of some of the Act I music to provide back story & to allow the Prince to appear rather than Stepsisters overkill. I also like the score much more now than I did when I first heard it. I'm not going to do a review, as @Emeralds reviewed the same cast much better than I could, but the highlight for me was, probably unsurprisingly, Frola's Act II solo, especially the manege. While I'm not massively keen on the in the round staging as a whole, all that space does give the men a lot of jumping room! He didn't just do the usual jetes either but interspersed a jump I don't know the name of which I think I've only seen done as a stand-alone jump before, not as part of a manege.

I've just spotted this cast sheet photo on Twitter, as Gary Avis retweeted the linked tweet. Very interesting casting for For Four. I know it's changed due to injury but it still must be pretty good that Liam Boswell is cast in a role like that, alongside much higher-ranked dancers, when he's still only an Artist. Surely he must be in line for promotion.

As no-one else has posted any curtain call photos in this thread, a few from last night with Erina Takahashi as Cinderella, Francesco Gabriele Frola as Prince Guillaume, Rhys Antoni Yeomans as Benjamin, Emily Suzuki as Edwina and Julia Conway as Clementine. I'm sorry the dimensions are all over the place but I had to crop bits of corps members out of some of them (see previous post)!

Digging out my ticket from 2019 (in my programme for Manon, wish ENB would revive that) it was section G row 7 seat 7 so almost as far to the side as you could get. However I have a feeling that I was allowed to shuffle along a bit for Acts 2 & 3 as there were quite a few empty seats. I definitely preferred my view this time from section J row 2 seat 48. I had very few issues with the dancers blocking my view, only the odd moment in Act II, until it came to the curtain calls when the corps lined up round the edge of the area & made it impossible for me to get any decent curtain call photos while they were standing there. So most of my curtain call photos feature the backs of heads & shoulders of the corps!

Try Googling: Like Water For Chocolate New York Times. I was able to read it that way whereas when clicking directly on the link in today's Links I hit the paywall.

@Emeralds Last time I was well round to the side. It's hard to remember 4 years on what the view was like for every scene but my curtain call photos have a lot of profiles or backs of heads, so I thought I'd go for central this time. I'm also hoping the view of the projections will be better. I must have missed a lot of them last time as when I saw the livestream of the proscenium version from Munich last year there were far more projections than I remembered & some parts of the narrative made rather more sense as a result.

Just when I'd been feeling pleased at being able to get a central 2nd row stalls seat for tonight...!

I use both options & haven't found it makes a difference. Last week I did the going via the Friday Rush page option & it worked fine.

A continuation of the previous cast change so Prigent presumably hasn't recovered from whatever he's suffering from.

I've got Carlos on 27th so I really hope they don't add any more strike dates. As it is, Nozze will be the 5th performance in just over a year that I've been unable to get to due to strikes, and 3 of the 4 previous ones were unrearrangable.

I have no issue with guide dogs at theatres because I know they have been extremely well trained so I do not have to worry about them jumping up/pawing/licking etc. I remain deeply impressed by the guide dog I once saw sitting through a performance of Tippett's King Priam without making a noise, when that music made me want to howl! However comfort/emotional support dogs will not have necessarily been trained in the same way & therefore may not be as well behaved.

Drat, I'd got a ROH Nozze di Figaro booked on 20th July so bang goes that. The far sides of the stalls circle are in use for this production so I'd managed to get a ticket for only £27. Now there's nothing available under £69 for the other dates & I don't want to pay that much so I guess I won't be seeing it at all.

I'm pretty nervous around dogs too, due to having OCD, so I too was pleased it wasn't too near me as I would have likewise not been able to concentrate on the performance if it was near enough that there was a risk of it touching me. It's all very well a dog being comforting to its owner but that doesn't take into consideration other audience members who are made uncomfortable by it!

Not sure about the lapdog effectiveness. Earlier this season I spotted a woman in the main auditorium with a lapdog!