Sleeping Beauty
Hex, National Theatre review - 12 months after being sent to sleep by Covid, Rufus Norris's show is backWednesday, 07 December 2022
Hovering way, way above us, three aptly named high fairies, in voluminous chiffon, open a show that may not be airy in the metaphorical sense, but invites us to cast our eyes upwards continually – no bad thing to do in the bleak midwinter of 2022.... Read more... |
Koen Kessels: 'there's a joke in ballet we only have two tempi' - interviewWednesday, 31 May 2017
Koen Kessels is on a mission to change the culture around music in ballet. Anyone who has heard the Belgian conduct will know that he is the right person for the job: Kessels makes the classic scores come alive in the pit like nobody else I’ve heard... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Australian Ballet, cinema broadcastThursday, 06 October 2016
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised – at least in my local multiplex, which was deafeningly empty with just five spectators. I suspect a combination of circumstances to be at work: the... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 06 August 2013
The Bolshoi Theatre reopened in late autumn 2011 after a problematic six-year refurbishment said to have cost a tidy billion dollars, many times its original estimate thanks to corruption - it needed a corker of a ballet premiere to pop the eyes of... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, English National Ballet, London ColiseumFriday, 11 January 2013
If anyone who saw Matthew Bourne’s irreverent rewrite of The Sleeping Beauty currently at Sadler’s Wells is curious about the original classical ballet, they’ll find it in rousing glory and glinting style with English National Ballet at the Coliseum... Read more... |
Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty, Sadler's Wells TheatreSaturday, 08 December 2012
It depends what you expect. This is Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. So what do you expect of (a) Matthew Bourne and (b) The Sleeping Beauty? On both counts I’d answer: much more than we get here. Bourne at his best is brilliant - his Swan Lake,... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, English National Ballet, Milton Keynes TheatreThursday, 18 October 2012
Has the great ballerina Tamara Rojo ever done a more nerveracking performance than she did last night in Milton Keynes? On her first night as player-manager of English National Ballet, both its new artistic director and its chief ballerina,... Read more... |
The Prince of the Pagodas, The Royal BalletSunday, 03 June 2012
As Mrs Thatcher used to say, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Solutions have been flung with a will at the problem ballet of Kenneth MacMillan’s last years, his orientalist fairytale The Prince of the Pagodas - the Royal Ballet’s... Read more... |
Irek Mukhamedov dances again in LondonTuesday, 20 March 2012Former Royal Ballet leading star and Bolshoi hero Irek Mukhamedov is coming out of retirement to perform in Peter Schaufuss's Tchaikovsky Trilogy at the London Coliseum 23-28 July. He will be playing the roles of Rothbart in Swan Lake, the Queen’s... Read more... |
These Go To Eleven: The Problem of Noisy OrchestrasSunday, 03 October 2010
“Last summer we played a gala performance at the London Coliseum which included extracts from Spartacus, and most of the brass players wore earplugs because the music was relentlessly loud,” says Paul Murphy, Principal Conductor of the Royal Ballet... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Birmingham Royal Ballet, London ColiseumTuesday, 20 April 2010
Good dancing - never mind great dancing - calls for an investment of imagination in every point of the foot, every raise of the arm. Why otherwise do the constant drill of turning out the leg, stretching the instep, taking fifth position, if the... Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Royal BalletSunday, 01 November 2009
Critics did not cover themselves with glory after the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty in St Petersburg on a snowy January night in 1890: “We cannot help regretting the means chosen by the theatre directorate in lowering the standard of artistry of... Read more... |
