Birmingham Royal Ballet is bringing Sir David Bintley’s Cinderella back to the Lowry, Salford in March (6-8).
The production was first seen there in 2011 (as well as on TV at Christmas 2010), and, hugely popular, returned in 2017. At that time it featured William Bracewell as the Prince – he’s now with the Royal Ballet in London, but returns to the role for a couple of performances in Birmingham in February, then on tour in Japan in June.
Birmingham Royal Ballet’s director, Carlos Acosta, says: “Cinderella is one of our most visually stunning productions, demonstrating BRB’s commitment to touring the very best that ballet can offer.”
It’s a lavish production of Prokoviev’s ballet, done in true fairytale style by Bintley and designer John McFarlane, who provides an almost unbelievably shimmering glass coach, cute animal costumes, a glittering ball scene and a whirring, stage-filling clock to strike midnight as Cinders loses her shoe.
The show was intended to be the biggest BRB had done to date, to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary, but it needed its own fairy godmother before ever going to the ball.
David Bintley told me, back when it was new: “The credit crunch made it seem at one point as if the ballet would never be performed at all. We were no more than a week away from pulling the plug – then suddenly a legacy (which we had been told about, though not the amount) turned out to be a very big one. It covered almost half the entire budget for Cinderella.”
Because of his knowledge of the Frederick Ashton version of the ballet – which was made in 1948, just three years after the work was first given in Russia – he had to “unthink” it first. As a dancer with the Royal Ballet in London, he had been a famous exponent of one of the Ugly Sister roles, which Ashton gave to male dancers for comic effect.
In this version the Ugly Sisters are danced by girls, named Skinny and Dumpy (in accordance, he said, with Prokoviev’s own score). That also gave him the chance to present a rather more feisty Cinderella than sometimes imagined, chasing her mean-minded siblings out of the kitchen when they get too obnoxious.
He also made the strange quotation of the march from The Love Of Three Oranges (the composer’s own, earlier, opera) in the score into a little sub-story in the ball scene.
“I asked myself: ‘What am I going to do with those oranges?’” The answer was that in that scene, Dumpy is a very greedy girl indeed!
His Cinderella is also radiant with optimism. If ever a ballet had a happy ending it's this one, as Cinders and her Prince walk into the distance with a golden sunrise ahead of them. That should cheer us up on any dismal day.
More info and tickets here