fairytales
Jasper Rees
The earliest known versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella appeared in an Italian compendium of fairytales known as the Pentamerone. They were collated by Neapolitan courtier Giambattista Basile and published in the 1630s after his death. The 50-strong anthology also includes versions of Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. None of these familiar stories has made it into Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s cinematic sampler of Basile’s collection. Instead he has plumped for three lesser-known fables, each of them illustrating the moral folly of ruling potentates.No doubt for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of Sondheim’s Into The Woods. That opera companies can and should stage Sondheim is vindicated by this production: the musical values are superb, my only niggle being that James Holmes’s excellent pit players are hidden offstage. The tricksy ensemble numbers are dazzling, with every word and melodic line thrillingly clear.James Brining sets the opening Read more ...
David Nice
Sunlit golden mean or slightly hazy middle-of-the-road? Conductor-director Iván Fischer's fully costumed and imagined concert of The Magic Flute - or perhaps it would better have been titled Die ZauberFlute given its intelligent mix of sung German and English dialogue taken by six excellent young British-based actors - was always going to be hard pressed to match the recent, hyper-communicative English National Opera/Complicite revival.In fact, its concept shaped up rather well in comparison. But whereas ENO had at least two world-class singers in the Tamino of Allan Clayton and Lucy Crowe's Read more ...
David Nice
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the Overture composed 16 years earlier – certainly the most perfect masterpiece ever written by a 17-year-old. Add a fluent ensemble of actors, a sense of high style in costume design and, above a simple stage with audience on three sides and the orchestra on the fourth, a hammerbeam oak forest in the very hall where Twelfth Night had its first known Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When producing Cinderella, the main question is: sweet or sour? That Prokofiev score is splendid, but it's no walk in a candy shop; in Act I the stepsisters have passages so scraping, spiky and dissonant that sugar-coating would seem to be out of the question. On the other hand, there's a Nutcracker-like family audience at the ready for pretty productions which skim lightly over the whole neglect and cruelty thing – but that leaves you with a story so bland that even Disney had to invent singing mice to perk it up.Big international choreographers tend to go for more acidity, but with Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too. The rest is a palimpsest of story treatments, costume designs, and questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, presenting many Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
I habitually skipped over Hans Christian Andersen's Little Match Girl in my childhood fairy tale compendium because I couldn't bear the sadness (see also: The Happy Prince *sob*). Parents of sensitive children will therefore be relieved to know that in Arthur Pita's 2014 dance version, which is back at the Lilian Baylis Theatre at Sadler's Wells this Christmas season, any tears at the titular waif's lonely demise will be vastly outnumbered by smiles at the fun and fantastical world Pita and his imaginative collaborators have conjured up for her to inhabit before and after death.Pita sets the Read more ...
David Nice
Why play a very substantial act of ballet music in concert? In the case of Aurora’s wedding entertainment from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, there are at least three good reasons. It embraces the most inventive and unorthodox of divertissements in any ballet – the one in The Nutcracker comes a close second – and a symphony orchestra deserves the chance to perform at least a substantial chunk of what Stravinsky called Tchaikovsky’s chef d’oeuvre. Besides, you won’t have heard every sequence in any choreographed version, not even the very thorough one by Matthew Bourne, who includes more Read more ...
Barney Harsent
After the roaring success of Daredevil this year, Marvel brings us the next instalment in the TV rendering of their universe – or part of it at least. Jessica Jones, created by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos in 2001, is a failed superhero and volatile PI who copes with her demons by drinking so heavily that at least one of her superpowers seems to reside in her liver. Super strength, near-flight and a fine line in withering sarcasm make up the rest.Once again, Netflix have released a show, in its entirety, on one day, so it’s up to us how we consume it. Rather than the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body. Then, two years ago, perhaps sighting the end of that particular road, he made a surprising swerve into narrative with Raven Girl, which last night received its first revival at the Opera House.Raven Girl is a fairytale which pays Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christopher Wheeldon is the purveyor of pretty. You can perfectly well see why San Francisco Ballet, who commissioned a new full-length work from Wheeldon in 2012, got cold feet at the prospect of tackling the difficult, Britten-scored Prince of the Pagodas, and steered Wheeldon instead towards Cinderella, with its ready-made audience of little girls in blue sparkly dresses and splendid Prokofiev score. I'm sure it has been a useful addition to SFB's repertory, and to that of Dutch National Ballet - the co-commissioning company who gave the piece its UK première last night - but I wonder Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
The Watts Gallery in rural Surrey is a very genteel setting for a show by a figure who for most of his life was denied polite society. Richard Dadd spent 42 years in mental hospitals, first at Bethlem, then Broadmoor. As one can infer, he was criminally insane, and despite a disarming interest in fairies, his life and work cannot be spun into a happy-ever-after narrative.It's the fairies not the diagnosis that won him acclaim, inspiring his two greatest works: The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, 1855-64 (main picture) and Contradiction. Oberon and Titania,1854-58 (pictured below) are both Read more ...