Ashton's Cinderella - new Royal Ballet production

[Blossom]

As an aside, I am bringing a group of people including someone in her first year studying costume making. Does anyone know if the Amphi displays are still for Sleeping Beauty or if they have changed to reflect Cinderella?

[Jan McNulty]

45 minutes ago, LinMM said:

I’ve got to re book a seat for April 25th and have never seen so many seats available in all areas of the house but especially the Amphitheatre…where unfortunately there will be one more available soon! 
I know it’s still a month away but the rail strikes have been suspended already the school holidays will be over by then so am surprised at so little sales so far. 
I can’t help thinking that it must have something to do with BRB Cinderella in the round at RAH coming so soon even though a totally different version etc. People just haven’t got the money to go to that many different performances and the BRB production has been advertised for a while now. 
Hopefully things will pick up in the next couple of weeks though. 
Will just add here if anyone is interested in a seat in the Amphi G.64 (£70) on 25th April ( Takada and Edmonds) then please message me! 

 

I think you mean ENB!

[Guest oncnp]

3 hours ago, Ingrid said:

Cinderella does not want to go to the ball so she can meet the prince and marry him, she just wants one night for herself, where she is not abused by her family. Meeting the prince and they falling in love is something that happens but she’s not too hopeful about it ( given her circumstances). When she is back at home and prevented from coming forward as the girl the prince is looking for, she fights to free herself and try the glass sleeper because she is tired of the life of servitude and literal abuse she was forced upon by her step mom and sisters. The Prince does his part but Cinderella is part of the reason they meet again at the end. 

 

Very interesting. Never thought if it like that. 

 

Have been watching the 2010 (I think) BRB production (free on Vimeo) to familiarize myself with the score and there she "earns" her chance by the act of kindness to the disguised Fairy Godmother.

 

And if anyone is familiar with that production, is that Alexander Campbell as the Dancing Master in Act 1? 

[alison]

3 hours ago, Blossom said:

As an aside, I am bringing a group of people including someone in her first year studying costume making. Does anyone know if the Amphi displays are still for Sleeping Beauty or if they have changed to reflect Cinderella?

 

They were still Sleeping Beauty on Thursday.  Whether that will change, I don't know - but I'm not sure it would be a great look, having previous designs for Cinderella on show just when a new production is being premiered.

[li tai po]

Blossom, don't miss two massive ceremonial Egyptian cloaks in the downstairs cafe from the magnificent 1968 production of Aida - beautifully hung to display their full size.

[Guest oncnp]

And there are occasionally displays downstairs in the Linbury foyer. And the back entrance to the Ladies

[LinMM]

Yes Jan you are right!! It’s ENB performing Cinderella in the round at RAH not BRB. My mistake 🙄
I obviously need to go to Specsavers! 

[Jan McNulty]

3 hours ago, LinMM said:

Yes Jan you are right!! It’s ENB performing Cinderella in the round at RAH not BRB. My mistake 🙄
I obviously need to go to Specsavers! 

 

I need to go to Specsavers too!

[Blossom]

11 hours ago, alison said:

 

They were still Sleeping Beauty on Thursday.  Whether that will change, I don't know - but I'm not sure it would be a great look, having previous designs for Cinderella on show just when a new production is being premiered.

I thought it was unlikely to change given that Sleeping Beauty continues in May... Still worth getting a close up so she can see the detail on a tutu! @li tai po and @oncnp thanks for flagging the other displays too! Will at least see the ones by the downstairs cafe!

 

[Sim]

3 hours ago, Blossom said:

I thought it was unlikely to change given that Sleeping Beauty continues in May... Still worth getting a close up so she can see the detail on a tutu! @li tai po and @oncnp thanks for flagging the other displays too! Will at least see the ones by the downstairs cafe!

 

There is also a Swan Lake tutu just before you get to the Amphitheatre toilets.

[FLOSS]

I seem to recall that ticket sales for Coppelia were quite slow at first. Tickets for the performances to be given by the few dancers with whose names non ballet goers were familiar sold quite well. Ticket sales for other casts only really picked up after the reviews came out. The main problem with Coppelia was the Christmas ballet goers' lack of familiarity with a ballet which had also been out of the active repertory for far too long.In the case of Coppleia the absence from the Covent Garden stage was the best part of two decades. The Royal Ballet on that occasion seemed to operate in the complacent belief that its reputation would sell tickets and that there was no need to take active steps to market a work which had become unfamiliar through long term neglect. They were lucky with ticket sales for Coppelia. It remains to be seen whether they will be equally lucky with ticket sales for Cinderella after the reviews are published..

 

So here are the current problems with this revival. The first is the place of the founder choreographer's works  in the company's repertory. Ashton's Cinderella,a ballet whose revival was long overdue, has slipped from the active repertory and the general audience's collective memory.It has become part of the company's vast holding of major works which have become unfamiliar through neglect. A great number of Ashton's ballets fall into this category. People understandably tend to be hesitant about buying tickets for unfamiliar, neglected  works no doubt working on the basis that there must be good reason for such neglect.It does not help the Ashton cause that so few of his works are programmed in any season and unlike MacMillan there is not a single one of Ashton's works which has a guaranteed place in the regular turnover of repertory. By my calculation you have to be at least  fifty years of age to be in any way familiar with the full range of his output.

 

Then there are the effects of Covid. Most arts venues rely on a regular audience to keep them afloat financially, They are experiencing difficulty in attracting audiences back.I am not sure that it is fear that is the problem here. I think that the root of the problem is the fact that the regular audience has got out of the habit of going to the theatre. Those in charge at the Wigmore Hall are working on the basis that it will take at  least two years to rebuild their audience. I don't think that the Royal Opera House is immune from the loss of an habitual audience.Indeed it seems that the organisation is determined to make matters worse with massive price hikes for both opera and ballet performances. Thus making the theatre increasingly inaccessible to those on modest incomes . The opera company's problems are largely of its own making. I am not sure that the same is true of the ballet company.  I don't think it was a mistake to programme Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the same season but I think there are too many performances allocated to Cinderella and we could have done with an Ashton  mixed bill along the lines of the one we enjoyed last season. In my opinion the more Ashton the company dances the better.

 

It is very sad that a ballet that was once a staple of the company's repertory should be absent from the stage for so long. Perhaps it is me  but I find it a little unsettling that the powers that be at the Royal Ballet, or perhaps it is the marketing department, seem to feel the need to present this revival in the context of a significant anniversary. The fact that it is seventy five years since Ashton's  Cinderella was first performed is no indication of its inherent qualities. It does not make it a better or a worse ballet but it does suggest an element of concern that the work needs special pleading and cannot hope to succeed on its own merits. In the days before Dowell introduced, the Nutcracker tradition to the Royal Ballet Cinderella was the company's Christmas ballet and it wasn't unusual to see it, and, or Sleeping Beauty, programmed over Christmas and the New Year.

 

As far as Ashton's  classicism is concerned  Ratmansky identified him as "an heir of the old Russian tradition" in an interview he gave at the time he was working on his reconstruction of Sleeping Beauty and had been studying the Harvard manuscripts and the Stepanov  notation. Ratmansky went on to describe  Ashton "as may be the closest of all " (to Petipa) pointing out that he had been inspired by Pavlova  and had studied with former imperial dancers.

 

As I have said elsewhere, after the war Ashton decided that the company needed to move away from the sort of expressionist works that Helpmann created and appeared in and establish its credentials as a classical ballet company. In an interview which I think he gave in the mid 1940's Ashton said in defence of the classical tradition which the interviewer suggested was old fashioned and irrelevant-

 

" All ballets which are not based on the classical ballet and do not create new dancing patterns and steps within its idiom are, as it were, only tributaries of the main stream."

 

 After creating Symphonic Variations which according to Anita Young was created from identifiable elements from Cecchetti 's daily classes, Ashton created two works which display his understanding of Petipa's classical vocabulary; its idiom and demonstrates its continued  potential as a source of inspiration and creativity. In Scenes de Ballet he gives Petipa  a decidedly modern twist while with Cinderella he takes Prokofiev's recently composed score and creates a nineteenth century ballet with it. The ballroom scene includes allusions to the Swan Lake which Nicolai Sergeyev had staged for the company, As far as performing  Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the same season is concerned the two ballets used to feed off each other in performance. 

 

This revival is being staged against a social and financial background over which the Royal Ballet has little control but the theatre's administrative arm seem to have gone out of its way to make matters worse. The marketing effort has been pathetic. It is difficult to believe that no one noticed the lack of sales in the lower part of the house at a much earlier stage. I can't help thinking that the real problem in Bow Street is that the Chief Executive is a money man  whose skills lay in raising money for the Tate rather than someone with hands on experience of running a theatre or arranging concerts and other forms of entertainment for a paying public where it is essential for success to understand the audience's interests and tastes. It is noticeable that Sir David Webster who was in charge of the theatre from 1946  to 1970 had experience of running a department store and arranging concerts for a paying public before he arrived at the Garden. I believe that all of Webster's successors until Alex Beard's appointment had practical experience in theatrical and other forms of entertainment. Mr Beard's predecessors would have recognised the truth of Garrick's lines that "Those  who live to please must please to live."

 

Sadly Mr Beard seems to be of a different opinion. He seems to believe  that the paying public must conform to his ideas of how to run the organisation and how to communicate with his potential audience. Being of the opinion that communication with potential audience members should be by electronic means he has failed to exploit the marketing opportunities which the new extension to the building provides.

 

A company generally takes years to establish itself and even longer to achieve recognition as a world class arts organisation. Each season brings the opportunity for the company management to renew its reputation and standing and the danger that it may lose it if it makes too many poor decisions. Up until the closure of the theatre for redevelopment it was possible to say of both resident companies and the opera house administration that although they made some pretty spectacular missteps on occasions all three groups  seemed to understand the need to keep audiences happy; not to treat them as an awkward but necessary inconvenience and at the very least not to treat  audiences as if their only significant role was as a ready and unquestioning source of income,

 

The current regime seems indifferent of not oblivious to the danger of alienating its loyal audience members by its take it or l eave it attitude to complaints about the provision of poor essential service such as the website and the ever increasing feeling that Mr Beard and his immediate circle as technocrats are indifferent to the alienating effect that their sweating of the assets has on its regular audience.

 

I sincerely hope that the company does not take a massive financial hit with this revival and that if it does Mr Beard recognises that most of the fault lies with those parts of the organisation for which he is responsible. The last thing the ballet company needs is to be subject to greater control over its choice of repertory which is already far too narrow in its range for the continued creative and artistic health of the company. The last thing that we need is for the administration to get the idea that "Ashton does not sell " firmly lodged in its collective corporate consciousness.

 

[alison]

My recall is like FLOSS's: that Coppelia was generally a bit slow to shift initially - but then it didn't get the (to my mind excessive) number of performances scheduled that Cinderella has got.  I'm assuming that on this occasion that number was chosen specifically and wasn't later expanded to cover for some opera cancellation or other, as has been known to happen in the past.  I suppose one positive will be that the company should be substantially better at dancing Ashton by the end of this run!  What I don't understand (and forgive me, Jan and Ian, but I am still only about halfway through March's Links, so there may have been more publicity than I've already seen) is the lack of fanfare that appears to have been made about this New Production of a Royal Ballet Classic.  There needs to be far more in the general media than there has been to cover the number of performances scheduled.  And understandably it will take a while for sales to start moving in response to reviews, which is why I never think it's a good idea - if you have the leeway, which most companies don't - to cram in too many performances soon after the first night.

[Fonty]

It is strange that when they finally put on an Ashton ballet that hasn't been performed for years, they seem to schedule an extremely large amount of performances.  If my memory is correct the ROH did  the same thing with the Two Pigeons.   I am not quite sure whether they assume that novelty value will ensure a huge number of ticket sales, or they are going out of their way to prove that Ashton isn't popular any more.  

 

With regard to publicity, has anyone seen any posters on the tube?  I keep looking, but the various routes I take on a regular basis have not shown any.  The main ones I have seen have been for musicals such as Frozen, plays, or horse racing.  I have, however, seen quite a few for ENB's Cinderalla in the round.  

[ctas]

I’ve seen a lot of tube posters as well as some bus ones, they’re very pretty. I was at Charing Cross on Saturday night and a stranger was loudly commenting on every poster they passed, and for the Cinderella one their remark was “Royal Ballet are doing Cinderella AGAIN” and I almost corrected them about how long it’s been! 

[Blossom]

@Fonty I do hope you have written to Alex Beard to convey all of this.

Although we know that the ROH does need to cover a certain amount of cost that they cannot cover at present with their philanthropic support, I do wonder if Alex Beard is simply so out of touch with his audience that he can't recognise it. There is definitely an unwillingness to adjust costs to test whether this helps to sell seats - which would surely be more beneficial than simply giving seats away at the last minute (which may be responsible for the recent shift in tickets this week) .

Edited March 27, 2023 by Blossom
more to say!

[bridiem]

I notice that for tomorrow evening's performance it says '100 +' tickets left, but when you go into the seat plan there are actually not many tickets left (not sure how many, but way less than 100). So the info is misleading. Maybe that applies to other dates too? Does that info have to be changed manually? (Surely not.)

[Blossom]

1 minute ago, bridiem said:

I notice that for tomorrow evening's performance it says '100 +' tickets left, but when you go into the seat plan there are actually not many tickets left (not sure how many, but way less than 100). So the info is misleading. Maybe that applies to other dates too? Does that info have to be changed manually? (Surely not.)

I would strongly recommend clicking into each individual date. Easter Monday (matinee and evening) shows swathes of red and pink available seats.

[MJW]

18 minutes ago, bridiem said:

I notice that for tomorrow evening's performance it says '100 +' tickets left, but when you go into the seat plan there are actually not many tickets left (not sure how many, but way less than 100). So the info is misleading. Maybe that applies to other dates too? Does that info have to be changed manually? (Surely not.)

I noticed that the other day - it gives a (potentially) false  impression of poor sales on those days.

[alison]

You'd be surprised how quickly those odd single and double seats add up - there are, in fact, around 100 still available.  This is after I changed browser - because the website on Edge is telling me that I've exceeded my ticket limit - on a performance I haven't even booked for!  Getting that sorted might help shift a few more tickets, too.

[JNC]

Is the vast number of performances something to do with it (a rhetorical question I find interesting). I think there are 28 performances (including one schools’ matinee).

 

back in the day surely even swan lake etc wouldn’t have had this many performances - it’s almost one every day for a month! 
 

Im interested as to why something like woolf works (less “classical” ballet without stereotypical tutus etc, not necessarily a familiar story, shorter run/fewer performances) sold much better. 
 

This is not to criticise woolf works by any means (which I enjoyed) but is contemporary ballet more popular (dare I say?), or does it appear to be with more limited performances. Was Woolf Works better advertised (either paid or in articles) in advance of opening? It obviously had much cheaper tickets. Had enough people seen it before to make up those who went again, or was there a large proportion of those seeing it for the first time. How many “regulars” saw it as a proportion of the overall?

 

Two quite different ballets with different runs and marketing and lots of questions. I hope ROH team is crunching the data on this one. 
 

As @FLOSS has noted I hope any ticket sale “failures” (either empty seats or discounted) is properly researched by these types of questions rather than Beard and co writing off Ashton or other classical works outside of the big Tchaikovsky three as unpopular and irrelevant. 

[JNC]

7 minutes ago, alison said:

You'd be surprised how quickly those odd single and double seats add up - there are, in fact, around 100 still available.  This is after I changed browser - because the website on Edge is telling me that I've exceeded my ticket limit - on a performance I haven't even booked for!  Getting that sorted might help shift a few more tickets, too.

considering roh seats over 2000, 100 is only around 5% of this so it’s not surprising it’s not visually well represented on first glance. I guess 5% doesn’t seem like much in one sense, but depending on the price of the tickets you’re looking at anything between £1k to £17k of money there. Probably more averaging out to around £8k perhaps. Across 20 odd performances that’s over £150k at a conservative rough estimate…

 

5% seems like quite a lot in that sense! 

[alison]

3 hours ago, FLOSS said:

I don't think it was a mistake to programme Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella in the same season but I think there are too many performances allocated to Cinderella 

 

Yes.  There seems to be some sort of unwritten casting theory/rule that, apart from the best-known dancers, other dancers in the main role can only sell the house out a couple of times, or three at a pinch (it's been noticeable where dancers have "doubled up" in a role that there have tended to be more tickets available for those performances), yet this time round we're seeing dancers cast 3 or even 4 times.  We'll see what the demand turns out to be like.

[Timmie]

43 minutes ago, JNC said:

...Im interested as to why something like woolf works (less “classical” ballet without stereotypical tutus etc, not necessarily a familiar story, shorter run/fewer performances) sold much better... 

 

I aim to go to a ballet or opera once or twice a month, so Woolf Works was an easy choice for March, I knew I liked it and the ticket price was uncomfortable rather than painful. When it came to April/May, Cinderella was very much an unknown to me but seemed to be a cross between The Dream and The Sleeping Beauty, so I just booked for Sleeping Beauty. I really did want to see Cinderella but I wasn’t prepared to risk my monthly ballet treat on an unknown. (I am going now though 🙂).

[Odyssey]

I’m not sure if anyone in this thread has mentioned that the Cinderella run is a continuous one. With Swan Lake & Sleeping Beauty, the performances have been spread out through the season . From my own point of view, I am unable to be in London between the end of March and start of May so I’ll miss the whole run. 

[Fonty]

I am sure it will be a massive success, and tickets will be like hot cakes once the reviews come out.  

[Blossom]

Has anyone made a complaint to ACE about the impact of the lack of funding?

I am starting to wonder if the pricing survey is perhaps evidence to show them the impact of the cuts...

Maybe just wishful thinking

[JNC]

I hope not too off topic but given we have strayed into it already in the thread

 

i was looking back through my old programmes and remembered the Autumn 2018 season when I saw both Mayerling and Bayadere.

 

I was only going to see one of those two ballets and hadn’t seen either before or didn’t know much about them. I remember ROH seemed to market Mayerling much more (was there a poster of McRae?) focusing  on the intense dark nature of the ballet, Macmillan’s intense choreography and the male taking the leading role. It sounded very exciting so I picked Mayerling. Bayadere was just a blurry photo of some of the “shades” which didn’t give me a sense of what to expect. 

 

I got the ballet bug closer to the time after booking had opened (and given back then reasonable amphi tickets were around £25) I researched La Bayadere a bit more. I remember ROH didn’t really seem to marketing it much at all, so I just used Google! After reading about how the shades act was revered in ballet as a Petipa masterpiece, I was sold. 
 

ironically I ended up not liking Mayerling very much at all (probably a combination of me not being a big MacMillan fan, I appreciate him but he’s not up there with Ashton/Balanchine/Petipa for me and I didn’t think I saw the right cast to be honest) but loving Bayadere.
 

The reason why this got me thinking was as someone who didn’t know very much about the wider ballet repertoire back then other than the very well known classics, Bayadere I felt wasn’t advertised very well at all by ROH. I wonder if a similar thing is what is happening to Cinderella - given it’s not been in the rep for years they don’t have tantalising clips showing the choreography/dancing/sets etc, maybe realising a snippet of this post the gala evening would help. Cinderella at least is a well known story compared to Bayadere but if you can’t visualise it as a ballet it may not appeal/or be too big of a risk to book. 

[LinMM]

For anyone who has seen those wonderful old pictures of Fonteyn as Cinderella standing wistfully with her broom I would think it would be very easy to visualise Cinderella as a ballet!  

[BalletBoysDad]

Does anyone have a link to (or image of) the cast list for tonight’s opening?

[Guest oncnp]

1 minute ago, BalletBoysDad said:

Does anyone have a link to (or image of) the cast list for tonight’s opening?

Cinderella-27.03.23-v5.pdf (roh.org.uk) and upthread. You can also get it from the drop down box under "Tickets and Events" on the website. 

 

[BalletBoysDad]

8 minutes ago, oncnp said:

Cinderella-27.03.23-v5.pdf (roh.org.uk) and upthread. You can also get it from the drop down box under "Tickets and Events" on the website. 

 

Ah wonderful, thank you! 🙏🏻 

[Richard LH]

On 14/03/2023 at 17:51, annamk said:

I just noticed on the RoH website that Nicol Edmonds replaces Marcelino Sambe as The Prince - dancing with Akane Takada - for all his dates in April. 

No disrespect to Nicol Edmonds, but I was musing why the only other male Principal not otherwise cast as The Prince, Ryoichi Hirano, isn't stepping in for Sambe. Is Ryoichi still  away  at Northern Ballet, or otherwise engaged perhaps?

[Jan McNulty]

3 minutes ago, Richard LH said:

No disrespect to Nicol Edmonds, but I was musing why the only other male Principal not otherwise cast as The Prince, Ryoichi Hirano, isn't stepping in for Sambe. Is Ryoichi still  away  at Northern Ballet, or otherwise engaged perhaps?

 

According to his IG he was involved in something with Scottish Ballet after Northern.