Dawnstar

Today I clicked on Friday rush for the performance I was after bang on 1pm only to immediately get a performance sold out message. After 5 minutes of refreshing & looking at other performances to see if they were showing rush tickets - which they were - the rush tickets for the performance I wanted suddenly appeared. Given all 10 of the stalls circle seats popped up together I doubt it was that they'd all been sitting in other people's baskets for 5 mins & I can only assume that for some reason the ROH's system didn't make them available until 5 minutes later than they should have been. I got the ticket I wanted but could have done without the 5 minutes of stress beforehand! PS It looks like the dancer biography pages are finally reappearing, albeit slowly. A few days ago only Ball's was up. Now all the Principals' are up except Muntagirov. There's a nice "action shot" for each dancer but no headshots. At this rate in a month or two they should have got to the Artists, who are the ones I usually want to check online as they don't get biographies in programmes.

Is Anastasia Act III the one where she's in a lunatic asylum? I've never seen the ballet & am not at all familiar with it. I was planning to skip the triple bill but I guess now I'll be joining in what will now probably be a major scrum for tickets. The ROH has ensured they're going to sell out one performance of a modern mixed bill! I'm very sorry, though not at all surprised, to read the announcement of Morera's retirement. I am now kicking myself all over again for not managing to see her as Mary Vetsera earlier this season. I also regret having started seeing the RB live too late to see her as Tatiana or Lise. Oh well, I suppose I should be glad that I've managed to see her in 11 ballets in the last few years.

I don't generally complain because I know I'm going to get a restricted view. My choice is between a restricted view & not going at all. However I did complain at the first interval of the first Mayerling I saw this season. I was sat in stalls circle C96 and discovered that the already restricted view had become even further restricted due to a curtain being drawn over the outer edge of the orchestra pit. Not only could I not see much of the stage further back, as expected, but I couldn't even see the entire width of the front of the stage, with the proscenium arch & several feet of stage in from it being hidden. When I spoke to the FOH manager he very kindly moved me to a seat in the Grand Tier for the rest of the performance. I imagine the seat would have cost well over £100 but it confirmed to me that it's only worth my attending if I can sit close to the stage as because as I couldn't see the facial expressions I wasn't moved by the performance. As the curtain is still there I am now avoiding C96 like the plague & suspect it might also be a bit of an issue for C95. C92 and C93 are both okay, as I've sat in both of those since (NB when I say "okay" I mean not restricted by the curtain, they still have the usual view restriction). I managed to, just about, see all 3 fish dives last night but I felt like I spend quite a lot of both Bracewell & Richardson's solos either not seeing them at all or seeing briefly appearing/disappearing arms & leg as they did turns beyond my field of vision! I could also only see the sleeping Aurora from the knees downward so I assume she got kissed awake...

It would be nice if the ROH would spend a small amount of its revenue from the increased ticket prices on soap. In the downstairs ladies loos this evening there were only 5 bottles of soap for 16 baisins.

I've now done the survey. I'm on the train home from Sleeping Beauty & having just spent 3 hours in a significantly restricted view & not very comfortable seat that set me back £70 did not make my survey responses any more charitable! Unfortunately the price questions did not cover the side stalls circle, the only area I'm both just about able to afford to sit in & prepared to sit in, so with the sole exception of an £80 stalls ticket for an Ashton Mixed Bill there wasn't a single other ticket option they offered that I would have been prepared to buy. I fear this may pressage reality... (The ballet pricing was so depressing I declined repeating the exercise for opera pricing.) Aside from the pricing, I found the question about ranking which artforms you're most likely to attend rather difficult. I go to opera, ballet, musicals & plays. Which I'm most likely to attend depends on which operas/ballets/musicals/plays they are!

£300 as top price for opera doesn't seem too unlikely to me, given it's been up to £285 top price for certain operas in recent seasons. £120 for rear amphi is however totally & utterly ludicrous in my opinion. I think over £100 for front amphi is too much, let alone for rear amphi. I've not yet had this survey but I'm not expecting to like it if I do get it. I'm starting to wish I hadn't got into ballet watching at the end of 2018. At least when I was only seeing opera seeing something once per run was usually enough but with ballet a big part of the interest, at least for me, is being able to see several casts in the same ballet in a run, which of course makes it much more expensive. I feel as though I'm just about clinging on to be able to afford the cheapest stalls circle seats & fear soon I'll be priced out altogether & have to stop attending.

So sweet that Magri & Ball are going to get to dance together on Valentine's Day. I think I may well be trying Friday Rush this week!

I'm amazed that the extremely high cost doesn't even include every R&J performance as standard!

Having received an email from ENB with links to various things including a round-up of audience reactions to SL & the Nutcracker, I had a look at the SL reactions link & was amused to spot myself 3rd on the list of quoted tweets. Can anyone else find themself on there? https://www.ballet.org.uk/blog-detail/swan-lake-audience-reaction-22-23

I used to buy a programme per production but, as prices have risen, for the last few seasons I have only bought one per season. I have yet to buy one for this season because I haven't decided which to go for. My first thought was Cinderella, as that's a new production, but then I thought that as it's new there probably won't be any production pictures so I might go for Sleeping Beauty instead & get a Cinderella one when the production gets its first revival.

More than a bit to my eyes. I've been going to the ROH for 19 years & I don't think I've spent even half that amount on tickets in the entire 19 years, let alone spending it in under 2 weeks! The RB must have some very well-off fans.

I saw Mamma Mia this afternoon, a show at which I do not expect a high standard of audience behaviour, and I think there were fewer people eating, drinking, chatting & phone checking mid-show than there were at Swan Lake!

I didn't say that it's not a good idea & I said I was surprised at how well it's sold, not that ticket sales are slow.

I wasn't surprised that Magri & Morera changed back into their Act I costumes, wigs & make-up for the curtain calls, given those were distinctly more flattering than their respective final looks!

I thought the same. Given the ROH's statement after the recent Arts Council cuts about needing to raise more money it doesn't feel like the best timing to part company with a long-term sponsor, at least not unless they've already got an equally or more generous sponsor to replace them.

@bridiem Yes, it was the prices lower down I was looking at. Well, the stalls prices since the other tiers have pretty much sold out. £275 for the gala vs £170 for the rest of the run seems like a big jump in price to me.

Henry VIII clearly interpreted the Bible, and religion as a whole, to best suit whatever he wanted at any particular time!

I had a look earlier (entirely out of curiosity, I certainly can't afford it) and was surprised at how many seats had sold. All the stalls circle & grand tier, nearly all the balcony & most of the central stalls block. Considering the prices are considerable higher than the rest of the Cinderella performances, & those in turn are significantly raised compared to the top ballet prices prior to this season, I thought most people would look at the gala in horror & book a normal performance with the same cast, but evidently I'm wrong. I guess a lot of ROH patrons have a lot more money than I do! Yes, I agree with this. You can't really tell how bad the restriction is likely to be for the depth of the stage. For instance the photos for the far sides of the stalls circle show that you can't see anywhere near the top of the stage but I don't think people would necessarily realise that from those seats you can barely see to the back of the stage in the far corner, let alone see anywhere near the back of the stage on the near side. (Particularly a problem in Swan Lake when neither the vision of Odette in Act III nor Odette's jump off the rock in Act IV are visible.)

I wonder how many stalls circle seats there are that actually have completely unrestricted views? I guess the central block 43-70 are all unrestricted? Apart from the row C ones behind pillars, that is.

Thank you. That was what I was trying to find out. So Tita & Pedro couldn't have got married even if Rosaura had dropped dead the day after her wedding.

Having sat in both rows on many occasions I would consider B, while not quite as restricted as C, to still definitely have a restricted view. I think the Mayerling pricing with row B £75 and row C £58 was a reasonable price difference, and reasonable prices for that matter. For me a £42 price difference for Cinderella is not reasonable; while I think row C is somewhat overpriced at £70 and row B is considerably overpriced at £112.

The website worked fine for me today but, for the first time for ages and certainly for the first time since covid, I couldn't get a ticket for one of the performances I wanted to book for. Admittedly my requirements were very specific - I was after one of only half a dozen seats - but that's because the ticket prices have gone up so much that there are literally only a handful of seats in the stalls circle that I can still just about afford. Until recently if I couldn't get row C & it was something I really wanted to see then I'd fork out a bit more for row B but now row B is £112 compared to £70 for row C so it's too expensive.

The timeline for the ballet does seem to be different from that in the book (with the caveat that I've only read the Wikipedia synopsis of the book). I would have thought if Pedro & Tita were jointly bringing up Esperanza that would have been more reason for them to marry. In the past, when far more people died young especially women in childbirth, plenty of men who were left widowers with children remarried pretty quickly to have a wife to bring up the children! That's why I was wondering if Mexican law didn't allow them to marry. British law at the time would have but only after decades of wrangling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deceased_Wife's_Sister's_Marriage_Act_1907 hence I wonder if Mexico, being a Catholic country, was stricter.

Does anyone know if Mexico had a prohibition on marriage with deceased wife's sister? After finally seeing LWFC this afternoon my biggest question is why Pedro didn't marry Tita after Rosaura's death rather than waiting 20 years then promptly dying together? (I'm also a bit baffled by the 20 years statement, as it looked more like 10 in terms of the children growing up & the clothing.)

@maryrosesatonapin I saw LWFC this afternoon. I ended up watching scene 2. I decided that not watching it would be even worse than watching it, as I've been worrying about it since I first read the synopsis of the novel when the ballet was announced. I decided it was unlikely the reality could be any worse than what I'd imagined & as it turned out I didn't find it as bad as I'd feared. In fact I found Rosaura's illness in Act III worse, though that may have been partly because it was Mayara Magri & as she's one of my favourite femalre dancers I didn't like seeing her acting that scene/character - similar to seeing her getting hanged in Frankenstein!