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Friday, October 22, 2004, WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
By Garth A. Buchholz
THERE'S a new Cinderella in town, hep cats, and she's swingin' to the sounds of Richard Rodgers jazz juice arranged by Winnipeg's own Ron Paley. OK, enough of that daddy-o lingo. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet's sizzling world premiere of A Cinderella Story, set in 1957, takes its jazz seriously, but has a heck of a lot of fun along the way with the rhythmically rapturous choreography by the highly accomplished Val Caniparoli of the San Francisco Ballet.
A Cinderella Story is a tremendously original achievement to mark the RWB's 65th anniversary celebrations.
The highly energized show is all dressed up in retro scenery and haute couture costumes by Sandra Woodall that evoke a kind of surreal '50s-era television look while being authentic enough to maintain some of the story's na?vet? and romance. There's even a scene set in an Arthur Murray dance studio.
The packed opening night crowd on Wednesday was cheering and clapping at intermission rather than rushing for the bar in the lobby, which said something about the show's pure entertainment value.
Dancer CindyMarie Small (you might want to call her "CinderellaMarie" now) was absolutely fabulous in the lead (alternating with Emily Grizzell) and took ownership of it in every way. It's hard to believe that after 14 seasons with the RWB, Small still hasn't been promoted to principal dancer, considering that she danced this principal part as if she's been premiering new ballets for years.
It's a great honour for Small to be given this opportunity, so she's very much like a Cinderella, who through some ballet magic is finally getting a ticket to the big ball.
The show playfully opens "pre-curtain" while the audience is still coming in, with our Cinderella watching a large console TV that has rabbit-ear antennae, of course. Her faithful Dog, performed as a jester-like character by dancer Darren Anderson, fusses around happily. We hear the TV advertising the "upcoming" Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, an actual 1957 hit TV special starring Julie Andrews.
Suddenly the set backdrop appears, a stylish open-concept house with two floors, and a horde of servants pour in, looking like something out of a New Yorker cartoon from that era. Cinderella's beloved widowed father (played by retired RWB principal dancer Johnny W. Chang, which was a real treat) enters the scene with an unexpected entourage. A wealthy entrepreneur, he now appears with a flashy new wife (Tara Birtwhistle) and two nasty but pretty stepdaughters (Cindy Winsor and Sarah Murphy-Dyson), who automatically despise the dowdy Cinderella, of course.
This sets the story in motion, although this Cinderella is not a doormat. She's a spunky girl who's too nice (at first) to fight back. The "prince," performed in an impressive debut by the commanding new RWB soloist Giuseppe de Ruggiero, is a rich playboy named Bob, a cool-cat hybrid of Gene Kelly and Bobby Darin.
Naturally, the Rodgers music and the scintillating syncopations of the Ron Paley Big Band, which performed live in the orchestra pit, are the biggest stars of this show. Paley has done an awesome job of arranging older, generally lesser-known Rodgers tunes into a musical swirl of smooth and sassy jazz that evokes the playful, romantic and somewhat rascally zeitgeist of the '50s.
Choreographer Caniparoli poured his talents into this production liberally, staging seamless transitions by making new set pieces appear even as the previous scene is still being finished. He also gives the dancers great material -- for example, in Act II there's an enthralling pas de deux between Cinderella and Bob, and at the end of Act I, there's a dazzling, surreal divertissement where a magical godmother appears from the TV set and summons magical creatures in a garden. Like the creatures in The Wizard of Oz, they all look a little familiar to Cinderella.
A Cinderella Story is brilliant in the way it fractures the fairy tale and has a kind of off-Broadway whiz-bang appeal, with more than a whiff of post-modernist irony (this Cinderella fits the shoe on Prince Bob).
All the dancers in principal roles did an outstanding job of giving their characterizations humour and detail -- there's so much to watch here that you could see it three times in a row and get something new out of it each time.
The RWB is taking A Cinderella Story, made possible by a $250,000 gift from The Asper Foundation, on tour through Western Canada during the 2004-2005 season.
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