Dawnstar

Yet another strike added on 2nd June.

Annoyingly I haven't managed to see him in the role & I bet the cinecast will be focusing on Red Riding Hood at that point so I won't get to see it then either.

Unless my eyes were deceiving me one of the others was Asian so must have been either Yu Hang, Sumina Sasaki or Chisato Katsura. Unless I got Bomin Kim wrong and it was 2 of the other 3.

Is she one of the smaller dancers? When they were lined up across the front of the stage kneeling down Viola Pantuso was at one end of the line and at the other end of the line was a dancer of a similar height so is she Ella Newton Severgnini?

I see the Corybantic Games casting has been updated. Leticia Dias replaces Claire Calvert in the first cast. Luca Acri moves casts to replace Marcelino Sambe in the first cast with David Yudes replacing Acri in the second cast. Also some more Anastasia casting has been added with Ryoichi Hirano as Rasputin and Bennet Gartside as the Husband in the Morera cast and Matthew Ball as Rasputin in the Osipova cast. Still no casting for the new McGregor though. Surely by now that must have been cast, as I can't believe McGregor hasn't been choreographing it for some time, so I wonder why nothing has been announced with under a month to go.

Mica Bradbury, Viola Pantuso, Alix Van Tiggelen, Bomin Kim & Leticia Stock....I think...!

The dancer biographies for the First Soloists are now up, in the new format. At this rate I'm not sure they'll get them all back up even by the end of the year, given there are more dancers at each of the main 3 lower levels. The end of season promotions may not help either, as they'll have to reshuffle the main page!

Nor had I. I knew it was the first time this season & the first time I'd seen him in the role but I'd assumed he'd done it in previous runs. Also does anyone know if Harry Churches was making his Florestan debut? I can't find him on any previous cast sheets. Query for those who are good at dancer identifications: who were the 8 Lilac Fairy attendants in the prologue last night? I was fairly sure of 5 of the 8 but not the other 3.

I thought Sarah Lamb was wonderful as Aurora tonight. For some reason, while I've seen her in all her leading MacMillan roles, this is the first time I've seen her in a C19th classic, apart from half an act of Odette in the Ukraine performance last season. I now have everything crossed that I'll be able to catch her in at least Swan Lake (in full) & Nutcracker before it's too late. She still looks completely plausible as a 16 year old despite being over 40. I don't know how dancers do it. I thought her Rose Adage was fabulous. Her balances between princes looked so steady that it almost felt like she could have done without the princes & just kept going! The vision scene seemed to fly by; I was rather surprised when it ended. I thought the grand pas was lovely. The fish dives were the fastest I've seen live, in fact the middle one was slightly scary as it looked like it teetered on the edge of going out of control! I thought Hirano was very good too, though in his case I've seen him in the Nutcracker so knew more what to expect. Though this prince requires rather more acting, which I thought ge did well. A mention to Harry Churches as Florestan. It's the first time I've seen him do a classical solo & he had lovely quiet landings. I was also pleased to see Meaghan Grace Hinkis as Princess Florine for the first time.

Beautifully put. If I could like your post, and especially this last sentence, multiple times then I would. For me theatregoing is one of the things that makes life worth living. I started regular operagoing years before regular ballet going & have seen several Don G productions but I can still find it feels long at times! Oh, this makes me feel old: when I was getting into opera YouTube hadn't been invented! I had to make do with Radio 3, borrowing CDs from the library, & buying CDs on offer in HMV (after consulting the library copy of the Penguin Record Guide). I think I might have to be paid £325 to book for a Kosky production sight-unseen! The only one of his I've seen live is The Nose and I would have left at the interval exceptlike Rheingold it didn't have one!

Amelia Townsend may not have got to perform the Autumn Fairy in Cinderella but at least all that finger pointing practice is being put to use as the Fairy of the Golden Vine tonight. Does that count as transferrable skills?

Interestingly, the side block of the stalls I'm overlooking this evening does not seem to be predominently inhabited by people in the Young ROH age range. So unless people on the scheme are allowed to buy lots of tickets apiece & bring several generations of their family with them then at least some of the tickets showing as unsold a couple of days ago must have been disposed of by other means.

No but I'd prefer them to either offer discounts (smaller ones) available to everyone or to not have put the prices up so much recently that the seats aren't selling.

I feel fairly put out that I've paid £70 for my restricted view side stalls circle ticket for tonight & will be looking across at quite a few people who have paid a heck of a lot less than that for unrestricted view stalls seats. Especially as back when I was young enough to qualify for the YROH the scheme hadn't been invented, all they had was last-minte student standby which was no use for me at university in Bristol because last minute train fares to London were unaffordable. So I never got any ROH discounts when I was younger & or course I never get any now as I'm too old.

I wonder if any production has ever featured 4 deeply hacked off princes glowering in the corner during the Act III wedding celebrations?!

No, it can't have been that because it was the same discrepancy yesterday when I bought a rush ticket. I was looking again today out of curiosity to see if the seat I returned had been re-sold, which it hasn't. (I wanted to swap stalls circle sides as from the performances I attended earlier this season I decided the view was better on the right side than the left. Of course I decided that a couple of weeks after having booked left for Monday's performance!)

I know there have been various comments previously about the overall tickets page for a production saying a few tickets are available but then none showing as available when you go into the seating plan screen. Today I've noticed the opposite. The overall tickets page says there are 15 tickets available for Monday's Sleeping Beauty performance but the seating plan screen shows, at a rough tot-up, somewhere in the region of 180 tickets available. So goodness knows what the website is up to now! I suppose it's good for potential purchasers to find better availability than the thought but not so good for the ROH if people think there's little availability so don't bother to take a look. (And I wonder if the swathes of unsold side block stalls seats mean they'll be flogged off cut-price to the student scheme at the last minue.)

I was actually looking at the cheapest tickets at the sides of the stalls circle, which are the tickets I buy. For Don Q they're presumably £67, vs £70 for SB & Cinderella. I went on to refer to the far side of the stalls circle but it wasn't clear that my first sentence was also referring to the sides of the stalls circle.

I suppose Don Q being (slightly) cheaper than SB or Cinderella is (slightly) encouraging. I wonder why they give the prices for the far sides of the stalls circle when they're not available for at least 90% of productions. The only time they ever seem to be available is for Mozart operas. I don't think I've seen them available for any ballets since I started booking ballets in 2018.

Argh, I carefully checked back the 2019-20 perfomances to make sure he hadn't done the role then but it never even occurred to me to consider those 2021 performances. I find it hard to remember those even happened, as I couldn't go to any of them for family illness reasons. I guess as the Bluebird only appears in Act III then it's the same as debuting in a full performance for that role. Actually I'm rather surprised to find he did the role in 2021 because the recent SB Insight livestream made it sound like he'd only just started doing the role, with repeated references to his inexperience vs Choe having being doing it for years.

With Leticia Dias, on 17th January, going by the cast sheets on the ROH website. I saw them together 2 days later on 19th.

If only there wasn't a train strike I would have been tempted to try to get a ticket, as I'd like to see Clarke as Florimund but I'm not keen on seeing Osipova's Aurora. Unfortunately even if I could get down to London today I certainly wouldn't be able to get back so that's no good. I'm glad I saw Hay as Florimund in the last run & therefore I'm not seeing him in this run, as I think I might find it a bit difficult to take him seriously as a prince just after seeing him as a Stepsister!

I don't know about the audience at the performance Rupert Christiansen attended but at the performance I was at (they must have been different performances as some of the casting was different) the audience included a group of teenagers who were clearly ballet students and a woman who I'm pretty sure was Daria Klimetova. Hardly people who are ignorant about ballet! Also going by the conversation I overheard from the group of 3 women sat one side of me at least one of them did ballet recreationally & all of them were used to seeing ballet. So Christiansen probably shouldn't be assuming that the audiences in Peterborough were ignorant about ballet. I also find his complaint about a lack of scenery odd. None of the ballet performances I've seen that have been made up of a number of short extracts have included scenery. Did audiences at the Fonteyn Gala, the Dance For Ukraine Gala or the Nuryev Gala feel shortchanged by a lack of scenery? I doubt it.

She did in some of the January/February performances. I believe that was her first time.

I thought I was being fairly picky when I commented above but he's far more critical. I also evidently have completely the opposite taste in recent works than he does as the works he preferred in the second part were the ones I liked the least & vice versa, apart from both of us disliking End Of Time.