Cinderella will touch the hardest heart
Halloween is still many months away, but that hasn’t stopped the National Ballet of Canada from rolling out the pumpkins ahead of time in its current revival of Cinderella, surely one of the company’s most delightful, romantically captivating productions.
Just as Prokofiev’s score provides leitmotifs to guide the dramatic action, so designer David Boechler has populated this Cinderella with enough pumpkins to make pies for an entire Four Seasons Centre audience. Their function, however, is metaphoric rather than culinary. This James Kudelka-choreographed Cinderella, without making any joltingly radical departures from tradition, is still notably different from the conventional rags-to-riches fairy tale.
Roughly set in the Roaring Twenties, it tells the tale of a feisty yet much-put-upon orphan who, while she may dream of escape from a pair of silly, selfish stepsisters and their sozzled mother, still values the comfort of hearth and home — and a well-stocked vegetable garden.
Up at the palace, our Prince Charming is seeking his own kind of escape. Tired of the artificiality of court protocol and the fawning sycophancy that goes with it, he yearns for something simpler and more authentic. Like many a prince before him, he hungers for true love rather than a dynastically suitable marriage.
And unlike some ballets where things go horribly wrong and dead bodies litter the stage — just wait for Romeo and Juliet in a couple of weeks — Cinderella ends so lovingly that even the hardest heart couldn’t fail to be touched. Kudelka being Kudelka, his Cinderella is also multi-layered. The surface action is more than enough to delight children, who routinely gasp when they discover the heroine’s chosen mode of transportation to the ball. At the same time adults will appreciate Kudelka’s wry humour, not always subtle insinuations and overall deployment of a time-honoured fairy tale as something that still carries a contemporary message. His insistence that Cinderella and
Cinderella. her prince effectively come together as equals is also bracing and appropriate. Each has something profoundly valuable to offer the other, an honest, simple love that, like a well-tended garden, will grow and flourish over time. It’s hard to believe a decade has passed since the National Ballet first raised the curtain on Kudelka’s captivating Cinderella. It’s equally difficult to grasp that Wednesday night’s leads, Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté, were the dancers given that same honour at the production’s premiere on May 8, 2004. Experience, however, is a boon in ballet. Rodriguez and Côté may no longer project quite the same youthful innocence, but they communicate the characters’ blossoming love with heartwarming tenderness. It’s truly a match made in fairyland.
Cinderella’s surface action is more than enough to delight children while adults will appreciate the ballet’s wry humour
But it’s also four years since the company last danced Cinderella so it comes with a smattering of debuts, including on Wednesday, that of principal character artist Alejandra Perez-Gomez as the heroine’s boozeguzzling stepmother. She staggers her way through the ballet with the air of a sodden, superannuated Hollywood siren; sad but also funny. And there are debuts to look forward to including those of Jillian Vanstone and Naoya Ebe in the romantic lead roles and Italian-born corps member Shaila D’Onofrio as the “Other Stepsister,” the shortsighted one. If D’Onofrio can come close to role creator Rebekah Rimsay’s showstoppingly hilarious performance she’ll have good reason to feel very proud of herself.