Dawnstar

While I wasn't very surprised that Choe didn't get to dance the title role, I was rather surprised that she only got to do Summer & Autum and didn't even get to do the Fairy Godmother. As for ideal cast: Cinderella: Laura Morera Prince: Matthew Ball Stepsisters: Thomas Whitehead & Luca Acri Fairy Godmother: Itziar Mendizabel Jester: Liam Boswell Summer: Melissa Hamilton Winter: Gina Storm-Jensen Spring & Autumn I don't have a preference. But really I'd be happy to see any of the 6 casts I saw again as I thought all of them were very good. (I did think male Stepsisters worked better than female ones though.)

We went to the matinee in Peterborough yesterday afternoon, as I thought it'd be much easier to get tickets for Peterborough than the Linbury. Sure enough, the theatre in Peterborough was maybe a quarter full while I see the Linbury is all but sold out. I was sat in the front row of the stalls, which I wondered might be a bit close for ballet but as there's a gap of half a dozen feet or more between the stage & the front row it was fine. No orchestra, as expected, but there was a live pianist & cellist for 2 numbers. I had expected to prefer the first half, as that was the more classical half, but unfortunately the first half was spoilt by not one but two small children (not together) being very audibly & repeatedly vocal in the audience. I know I'm sensitive to sound & find it difficult to block out unwanted noises but when I compared notes with my mother in the interval she too had found it very difficult to concentrate. Fortunately the squawking small children did not return for the second half. While the programme & most of overall cast were the same as in the reviews of the first night, about half of the numbers were danced by different dancers. Unfortunately the printed cast sheets available at the theatre were completely wrong for the first half. I hope the online cast sheet is correct, as that's what I'm going by. I wasn't madly keen on the framing device but at least I was expecting it. I enjoyed Rhapsody but having seen the RB doing it in full last season I did miss the scenery (& with the gorgeous music the noisy small kids were particularly annoying). I liked the dancers, Frieda Kaden & Oscar Kempsey-Fagg, and would have liked to see them together again, but the yesterday's casting didn't have them paired again (I see they are in another cast arrangement). I enjoyed La Sylphide, which I've only seen once before again in a gala. Funnily the James in this performance, Eric Pino Cata, looks rather like the previous one I saw, ENB's Fernando Carratala Coloma. Given my front row seat, I'm glad that ballet Scotsmen do wear something under their kilts! I thought Olivia Chang Clarke was nicely mischievous as the Sylphide but I think I would have liked a bit more ethereality (is that a word?). Swan Lake was afflicted not only by the noisy kids but also volleys of coughing from the audience. I don't know how the poor dancers managed to concentrate, I certainly found it difficult to do so. I thought Mason King partnered well. I regret that the Act II pdd doesn't include solos for both characters as I would have liked to see King & Mailene Katoch do some. I wasn't keen on the double Dying Swan, especially when it started with the same wind noises that I had disliked in the male-only version at the Dance For Ukraine gala. I must have seen Ava May Llewelleyn in the RB's corps but I'm afraid I can't say I recognised her. I thought Lucy Waine and Haoliang Feng put on a good performance in Diana and Acteon but both of them did have a couple of balance problems in their solos (she with couple of pirouettes & he had to put a hand down both times he landed a jump in a kneeling position). She was very good at keeping a big smile plastered on throughout though! End of Time I was baffled by. I had no idea what it was supposed to be saying or what the context might have been. The nude unitards painted with what could have been leaves made me think of the Garden of Eden but that would be near the start of time, not the end. There seemed to be an awful lot of walking around with the man carrying or dragging the woman. I found myself comparing it to the Ashton & Bourneville & thinking that they have so many more proper ballet steps. It also had my pet peeve of feet flexed rather than pointed. Fortunately after that things looked up. I liked the way the next three numbers in the second half were linked together, with the woman in Je Ne Regrette Rien having evidently recently dumped the man in Les Bourgeois. I really enjoyed the tango (or is it Argentine tango?) style A Buenos Aires. When looking up the dancers on BRB's website afterwards I was unsurprised to find Enrique Bejarno Vidal is Mexican as he had the perfect look for a tango piece (and made me think a bit of Corrales). I was so-so on the choreography for Non Je Ne Regrette Rien, some of it was rather jerky but I liked the spins all round the stage (I don't know the correct term for that movement). I thought Riku Ito gave the best performance of the afternoon in Les Bourgeois, brilliantly acted, great stage presence & so nice to have something amusing amidst the mostly serious programme. I liked Carmen but it did feel a bit MacMillan-derivative & I did spend most of the piece wondering what the primary school group that were in the audience would be making of the quite erotic choreography! I also didn't understand why Don Jose was in 19th century shirt & breeches but Carmen was in modern-looking undies. Nisi Dominus I was even more baffled by than End of Time. I wasn't keen on the choreography, couldn't work out what the context was supposed to be, and spent most of the time wondering if the costume was supposed to resemble a farthingale & if so whether that was the right period for the music (checking Monteverdi's dates afterwards indicates it was). I really enjoyed Majisimo. It was nice to have a group piece after the rest of the programme was all pdds or solos. Among the eight dancers Rachele Pizzillo, who I'd liked as Clara in 2019, stood out for me. (And that's not just bias because I recognised her as my mother said the same afterwards before I told her that she was the dancer we'd seen as Clara.) As Maddie Rose has already said, the ending does make it rather confusing as to exactly when one should be giving the dancers applause given they drift off stage gradually. Riku Ito was last to leave & raised a laugh by picking up the prop bottle that he'd had in Les Bourgeois & miming disappointment at finding it empty! I'd definitely go & see the company again, assuming they do more tours with mixed programmes in the future. (Though whether they'll bother to come to Peterborough again with the low ticket sales.) I'll also be looking out for the dancers whenever I next see BRB again. Unfortunately I can't make it up to Birmingham for their triple bill next month, unless someone knows a way to get from the Birmingham Hippodrome to Cadogan Hall in under 2 hours!

I'm trying to write a review of this afternoon's performance but it's too late & I'm too tired so I'll try again tomorrow!

Thanks. I've checked the ROH Flickr account & found the photos. He does look more or less how I thought he did but he's evidently not as tall as I thought he was. I'm afraid I had no desire to see that triple bill even once, let alone twice!

I didn't think of Hilarion as being a villain in the ROH's production but in the United Ukraine Ballet's version last year I thought Hilarion was portrayed as an out and out caricature of a villain, right down to his very fake-looking black beard.

Was this tweet a veiled way of saying "we haven't sold enough Aida tickets & need to shift some fast"? If so then it's evidently worked as the first 2 performances are now showing as sold out while every performance for the rest of the run is 100+ tickets available.

Junker evidently isn't the dancer I thought was him, as I thought he was fairly tall but he evidently isn't if he's playing Napoleon. Has anyone got any curtain call photos of him?

I think that's a coincidence because the original casting had Italian tenor Francesco Meli singing all performances before it changed to Meli only singing the second part of the run. SeokJong Baek seems to be the ROH's go-to tenor substitue at the moment: I saw him subbing in Cavalleria Rusticana at the end of last season & he'd already subbed in Samson & Delila a couple of months earlier. (Next season he's due to do Pinkerton opposite Hrachuhi Bassenz as Madame Butterfly, which is ethnically interesting!)

The King & Queen have been to both Mayerling & Sleeping Beauty this season so it's definitely not the first time any members of the Royal family have been to the ROH since September.

I'm not sure there's any point in begging O'Hare for Onegin casting preferences until he actually schedules the piece again! It kind of feels like the most comprehensive way to solve the problem would be to have fewer Principals!

I agree with right for Giselle. Left for Swan Lake (though 2 important moments aren't visible from either side). Not sure about R&J as I hate having to miss anything in that. I've never got to grips with using binoculars so always want to sit close enough to see the acting with the naked eye (and my eyes are very short sighted). I'm not interested in seeing an overview of the corps & the patterns they make. If I could afford it I'd always sit in the front row of the stalls. Sadly with the price rises I'm not sure I'll ever again be able to afford to sit there.

To be honest I would have preferred either Morera or Lamb to have got another go at the role, as I would have liked to have seen both of them & I'm never going to get to do so now. Naghdi's got probably another decade of career to go & seems to have danced almost everything apart from Manon (which she will surely do next season) so I would have been happy if she had waited until the next Onegin run to do Tatiana.

When the Bolshoi last came I skipped their Swan Lake & Don Quixote in favour of seeing Spartacus & The Bright Stream, given the two former I can see UK companies doing but the two latter I can't. (I find it hard to imagine the RB doing Spartacus.) So I'd definitely prefer visiting companies bring ballets that we can't otherwise see in the UK. Though I don't mind that Australian Ballet's bringing Jewels as I've not seen two thirds of that before.

I've started making a mental list, which I probably need to getting round to writing down, of which side of the auditorium is best for the restricted view side stalls circle seats for different productions, as it doesn't look like I'm ever again going to be able to afford to sit in unrestricted view seats. So far for this season's productions I'd go for left for Mayerling and Cinderella, right for Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker is about even.

Were you in C91? I tried out its opposite number C22 for a Swan Lake last season & decided that even though it's significantly cheaper than the rest of the seats in that area the view is so bad that it's not worth the saving.

After reading Morera's interview yesterday, I found myself thinking about Melissa Hamilton's stint at the Dresden Ballet some years ago. I remember reading about it at the time & being a bit baffled that a dancer would choose to dance with a smaller ballet company rather than one of the largest companies in the world. That was before I started watching the RB regularly & realised how few of the main roles she is allowed to dance, when it then made total sense. I wonder if Morera ever considered doing something similar so she could dance some of the roles the RB wouldn't let her do, especially Aurora & Odette/Odile given that almost every ballet company has those pieces in their rep. Morera does seem pretty weddd to the RB though. Am I right in thinking that she doesn't do masses of international gala or guesting appearances, compared to some of the RB Principals? Or did she used to do more of that & has wound it down in recent years when approaching retirement?

Checking the ROH database indicates that since 2007 when she became a Principal there have been somewhere in the region of 150 performances of R&J. Surely they could have let her do at least one of those! It's not as if it's a rarely-done piece that only a few dancers get to do. That she's still asking to do it just once & still isn't allowed to is almost unbelievable. Though admittedly it'd be frustrating for those of us who want to see her do it if she never did it in the UK then did a single performance in Japan!

That's a rather heartbreaking interview. Not just the section on Scarlett but also all the roles that she's never been allowed to do or got dropped from. I cannot understand why she's never been allowed to do Juliet, which she would surely have been amazing as, whereas other Principals are allowed to dance everything, whether suited to roles or not.

Also a pretty good description of modern ice skating! (Replace lifts with jumps for the singles competitions.)

She hasn't been on any of the Cinderella cast lists since. I've been checking because of wondering if she was okay. Sadly that presumably means that she isn't. Hope she recovers soon.

The first time I tried to give a dancer flowers I failed to get a card to go with them so she wouldn't have known who they were from due to my incompetence! I didn't have time to go to the stage door after that performance so had to explain when I bumped into her in the ROH a few weeks later. The night before last was only my 3rd attempt at flower giving & I evidently haven't got the organisation right yet! I suppose the way to do it without stressful rushing around just before the performance is to put in an order with a florist but that's too expensive for me (I gather Bloomsbury Flowers start at around £50-60).

When I spoke to her afterwards I did say that those flowers were from me, though obviously I didn't bore her with the full assembly details. I probably spent too long thanking her for all her previous performances that I've seen as it was. I did get slightly teary. For the second time that evening, having already gone a bit during the Act II pdd when I had an aaahhh-last-time-seeing-her-in-a-classical-role moment. I hope everyone there this evening enjoys seeing her final full-length classical performance.

(This post is probably irrelevant to anyone but me so everyone else feel free to skip it.) I'd like to praise the ROH stage door keepers for being incredibly tolerant & helpful to me yesterday evening. I wanted to give Laura Morera some flowers as an overall thank you for her performances I've seen over the last 5 seasons & decided doing so at Cinderella would be better than waiting to her last performance, where she'll have vast amounts. I tried several shops & stalls but larger bouquets were either too expensive for me or I wasn't keen on them, so I ended up buying 4 small bouquets in Tesco plus a sheet of wrapping paper. By this time it was quarter past seven & I didn't have time to go elsewhere to find somewhere suitable for some flower re-wrapping. The stage door keepers very kindly let me use a small table in the lobby, didn't look horrified as I ripped cellophane off 4 bouquets while trying not to scatter leaves, and let me have some sellotape to hold together the, well, flower arrangement would be too polite a term, more a flower bundle. Frankly I wouldn't have been surprised if the stage management had taken a look at the result & either sent it straight to her dressing room or consigned it to the nearest bin! Instead, to my amazement & pleasure, not only did my bouquet make it on stage but it was the one given to her to hold! (PS In case anyone's interested, I made it home at 2.50am last night.)

I agree that Whitehead managed to make the bossy Stepsister nicest out of the dancers in the role. As this production is the first time I've seen Cinderella, I'm not entirely sure if this is a good or a bad thing, i.e. how unpleasant or not the character was originally meant to be. I was somewhat reminded of Coppelia, when I unexpectedly (having previously mostly seen him play villains) found Whitehead's Dr Coppelius the most sympathetic & touching of those I saw. Continuing on the bossy Stepsister, while Richardson was somewhat drag queen-ish in his portrayl it wasn't as much as I'd feared he might be & I enjoyed his performance. It is somewhat surreal to see a Nutcracker Prince and an SB Prince prancing about the stage in frocks though! Richardson did the Act II fall particularly wholesalely - perhaps because he's a good deal the youngest in the role - and threw another one in at the curtain calls! (The next photo I have after this is just a blur of purple net crawling through the gap in the curtains!)

At least other UK opera companies have done the operetta relatively recently - I loved Opera North's in 2018 - even if the ROH haven't so it's been possible to see it, unlike the ballet