Royal Ballet Cinderella March/April 2023

[Bluebird]

1 hour ago, JNC said:

I don’t see Choe as Cinderella

 

Yuhui Choe danced Cinderella several times in the 2010/2011 season and was really lovely in the role.  Edited to add that Sergei Polunin was her Prince.

 

Here is the cast for one of her performances:

 

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=19703&row=0&character=Cinderella&person=Choe&searchtype=workprodperf

 

Here are the links to her other Cinderella performances that season:

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/SearchResults.aspx?character=Cinderella&searchtype=workprodperf&person=Choe

Edited May 5, 2023 by Bluebird

[Rob S]

Does anyone have a time machine I can borrow?

[JNC]

1 hour ago, Bluebird said:

 

Yuhui Choe danced Cinderella several times in the 2010/2011 season and was really lovely in the role.  Edited to add that Sergei Polunin was her Prince.

 

Here is the cast for one of her performances:

 

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=19703&row=0&character=Cinderella&person=Choe&searchtype=workprodperf

 

Here are the links to her other Cinderella performances that season:

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/SearchResults.aspx?character=Cinderella&searchtype=workprodperf&person=Choe

I think I meant I didn’t see her being cast in it in future, rather than commenting on whether or not she should be cast.

 

having said that I have to admit she wouldn’t be my preference if she was cast, but we all have our preferences! 

[alison]

34 minutes ago, Rob S said:

Does anyone have a time machine I can borrow?

 

If I had, believe me, it'd be in use 24/7  

[LinMM]

That was a lot of Cinderella performances in Spring 2010 winter 2010 and then spring 2011!! 
I didn’t start going to ROH a lot (again) until after retiring in 2012 and 90’s and noughties were not good years for me with parents dying and moving to Brighton and still working etc. 

I must have seen one of those performances though but it wasn’t Choe as Cinderella. I have a feeling it might have been Cojocaru ….but if it was might have been even longer ago since I’ve seen it than I thought!! 

[Henry]

When the ROH website used to allow comments, after the promotions were announced, there was always a lot of comments saying that Yuhui Choe should be made a principal.  However, it never happened.  The few times that I saw her in a principal role - The Two Pigeons, La Fille Mal Gardee - I really loved her performance.  Was she never offered promotion??

Edited May 5, 2023 by Henry
grammar

[Benjamin]

5 hours ago, Bluebird said:

 

Yuhui Choe danced Cinderella several times in the 2010/2011 season and was really lovely in the role.  Edited to add that Sergei Polunin was her Prince.

 

Here is the cast for one of her performances:

 

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=19703&row=0&character=Cinderella&person=Choe&searchtype=workprodperf

 

Here are the links to her other Cinderella performances that season:

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/SearchResults.aspx?character=Cinderella&searchtype=workprodperf&person=Choe

The fact that she danced the title role of Cinderella over 10 years ago but still isn’t a principal is crazy to me.

[Ondine]

One to enjoy!  Views of the ROH and several minutes of curtain call, Laura Morera as Cinderella! One for posterity. I'm so pleased they loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sophoife]

Resurrecting the thread because back in Oz and in the interval of the encore screening of Cinderella. I'm noticing so much more detail thanks to the close-ups (having sat in the front row of the amphi when seeing it live).

 

Luca Acri is a wonderful Stepsister, and I want Gary Avis' violet satin marabou-trimmed robes 🤭

 

The Fairies - talk about luxury casting! Beautiful Fumi Kaneko as L̶i̶l̶a̶c̶ Fairy Godmother, and Anna-Rose O'Sullivan, Melissa Hamilton, Yuhui Choe and Mayara Magri as the Seasons. The attendants and their weird-arse outfits I'm simply ignoring as they're completely irrelevant.

 

Wonder why Cinders is wearing immaculate satin pointe shoes and the fairies are in canvas? Miss O'Sullivan clearly in the Osipova school of The Tattier The Better when it comes to shoes 🤭

 

Was it director's choice of shots or was the change of Godmothers really that clunky?

 

As others have commented, the transformation of the pumpkin to a carriage is rather underwhelming, and Cinders just appeared in the carriage rather than being magically gowned. Where did the mice come from??

 

Oh and Darcey's purple trousers!!!

 

Further impressions at next interval.

 

[Sophoife]

Second interval and all I can say is, what beautiful dancing! Vadim Muntagirov and Marianela Nuñez, in solos and the pas de deux, are indeed masters of their art.

 

I still don't see the relevance of the Jester and his anachronistic outfit in this particular ballroom, but wow to Taisuke Nakao's dancing.

 

Lukas B. Brændsrød is a wonderful Wellington, and Philip Mosley an adorable Napoleon.

 

Also not quite sure why the fairies appear at the ball...

 

 

[Sophoife]

It's all over. Yes, when Cinders produced the second shoe and they both fitted and the Handsome Prince and his new Princess hugged, a tear might have risen to my eye...

 

Just gorgeous from all concerned. Now I have to wait until the end of June to see Sleeping Beauty .

 

Unfortunately the cinema people forgot to turn down the lights so we couldn't clearly see about seven minutes at the beginning of act III.

[FLOSS]

It looks as if the character of the Jester may have been introduced into the narrative  by Ashton himself as a way of giving the young Alexander Grant a role which would display his talents as a dancer and a creator of compelling characters. Describing the character as a Jester would not have jarred or been anachronistic in the context of the original designs which, if the designs on show in the made for American television recording from the 1950's  are anything to go by,seem to have set the action of the ballet in a sort of Tudorbethan ballet land.

 

I have no doubt that it was the presence of Alexander Grant in the company which led Ashton to create the role if the Jester in the way he did. At this stage of his career Grant was a dancer with a technique good enough to enable him to take over Brian Shaw's role in Symphonic Variations  and give him a place in the quartet of men who form the male corps in Scenes de Ballet. At the same time he possessed an even more impressive line in pathos, quirkiness, shape shifting and the creation of three dimensional characters . He had taken over  Massine's role of the Barber in Mam'zelle Angot tp great acclaim in the year before Cinderella was staged and his interpretation of the role woukd have been fresh in everyone's memory.  I often think that  it might help those who cast the role of the Jester and those who dance it from thinking of it as little more than  a leg machine role if they looked at the range of roles Grant had danced by late 1948, those he later acquired from older dancers and those he went on to create for Ashton during the remaining  twenty seven years of his career.

 

It is unclear why Ashton did not change the description of the character when the ballet received its new designs in 1966. Perhaps it seemed unnecessary all the time Grant was dancing the role or Michael Somes was involved in casting and coaching the work.Given the increasingly anachronistic direction in which the current rights owner has taken the Jester  in the two productions for which she has been responsible 1966 now seems like a missed opportunity to embed the character more securely in  the action of the ballet by renaming him. Of the Jesters I saw during the run I think that Liam Boswell was the only dancer to capture some of the character's otherworldliness and his essential sadness. The others seemed too concerned with the technical aspects of the role, thus missing its point.

 

 

[art_enthusiast]

1 hour ago, FLOSS said:

Of the Jesters I saw during the run I think that Liam Boswell was the only dancer to capture some of the character's otherworldliness and his essential sadness. The others seemed too concerned with the technical aspects of the role, thus missing its point.

 

I think Marco Masciari did as well - he came across to me as a sort of sprite, slightly malevolent, with some sort of magical power/desire for control, communicating with the face, etc.

Granted I had absolutely no clue what to expect, as it was my first time seeing the ballet.

I can certainly see him as Puck in future.

[alison]

I'm glad someone bumped this thread, because it reminded me to search for this:

 

https://www.stronghold-nation.com/history/ref/marotte

 

I also meant to say that I came to the conclusion, during the run, that some of my earlier misgivings about performances were probably down to various people dancing the choreography more as a Classical ballet rather than in a more Ashtonian manner.