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24.10.2017

Cinderella in St Petersburg — seamless staging and a starry lead couple

The Mikhailovsky Theatre’s production gives a 21st-century look to a classic 20th-century ballet.

Ballet reconstructions often carry a whiff of embalming fluid, but Rostislav Zakharov’s Cinderella, first danced at the Bolshoi in 1945, scrubs up brightly thanks to Mikhail Messerer’s brisk, coherent staging and a starry lead couple. Handsome new projections enhance and amplify Pyotr Williams’ original designs, giving a 21st-century look to a 20th-century classic. Complex transformations are effected at the flick of a switch. The passage of the four seasons in Act One’s miniature vision scene morphs seamlessly from cherry blossom to blizzard and the Prince’s (often omitted) round-the-world search for the missing crystal slipper is accomplished with minimal fuss and maximum impact. The Act Two ballroom scenes are an excuse for a private tour of St Petersburg’s palaces — fountained gardens, marble colonnades and double staircases — a Cinderella’s-eye-view of the gilded world beyond the scullery fireplace. There are obvious practical advantages to Gleb Filshtinsky’s virtual scenery, but these gauzy vistas also lend Cinderella’s adventure an air of unreality, reinforcing the bittersweetness of Prokofiev’s score (grandly played by Pavel Sorokin and the Mikhailovsky orchestra). The world she glimpses is beautiful but insubstantial and the sarcastic horns and doomy waltz measures, ticking with metronomic menace, all warn her that beauty may fade, that her happy ending might still slip from her grasp.

Step-for-step reconstruction has not been possible but Bolshoi-trained Messerer is adept at invisible mending. His own contributions include a witty and sinuous oriental number for Svetlana Bednenko: legs like a switchblade, arms like charmed snakes. Time stands still for the ballroom pas de deux, danced in a haze of stardust and reprised at Messerer’s re-worked finale in which a dozen happy couples orbit serenely around Cinders and her Prince. Anastasia Soboleva has the long lines, easy elevation and quicksilver speed needed for the heroine’s expressive soliloquies. Vaganova-trained Victor Lebedev was a noble partner and unleashed his bravura tricks — one-armed lifts in arabesque, tireless entrechats, a show-stopping grand pirouette — with gracious insouciance: definitely a Prince worth waiting for.

Star rating (out of 5)
Cinderella ★★★★★

Louise Levene, The Financial Times