Houston Ballet: a hugely entertaining Cinderella

Prokofiev’s darkly lush and glittering Cinderella was reportedly a hit when the ballet premiered at the Bolshoi in 1945. Conceived in war, this escapist fantasy provided a diversion from the bleak realities of postwar Russia. Since then, Prokofiev’s score has underpinned many reinventions among which Stanton Welch’s – originally set on Australian Ballet in 1997, now a staple of Houston Ballet’s rep – stands out for its touching rewrite of the central love story and its devastating send-up of the aristocracy.

Then there are the zombies.

Conservative Cinderella stans may view some of Welch’s artistic choices as a bridge too far: there is no fairy godmother, no pumpkin overhauled into a carriage, and no adorable woodland creatures to magic up a ball gown or serve as footmen. When Cinderella’s malevolent stepmother (a chilling performance from Riley McMurray in the cast I saw) tosses her dead mother’s wedding dress into the fireplace, ensuring that Cinderella has nothing to wear to the ball, Cinderella seeks solace in the graveyard. There, her mother’s ghost hovers inconsequentially (in a squandering of Yuriko Kajiya’s talents). Her undead companions brandish rags in a jumble of dance styles – an odd use of Prokofiev’s ditties for the fairies of spring, summer, autumn and winter, not to mention the iconic ‘Cinderella Waltz’ during which this Cinderella simply walks. I doubt a single child in the audience was convinced that all the flailing and intermittent outbursts of ballet manifested a couture genius at work; in any event, a sparkling gold shift-dress, billowing cape and feathery headdress evocative of the Jazz Age materialised and Cinderella was carried aloft to the ball.

Zombies are not a terrible idea, given the dissonance and acerbic tenor of many passages in the music that suggest that sinister forces remain at play in the postwar era. They arrive en masse outside the palace to remind Cinderella that she has a pressing engagement at midnight: they literally stop time, temporarily paralyse the other ball guests, rip off Cinderella’s finery and deliver her to the protective embrace of her mother’s ghost. This is so weird, yet poignant and effective.

Another winning element is the delightfully spunky heroine – the luminous Tyler Donatelli. In patched overalls and a pixie cut à la Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, this Cinderella wields an impressive one-two punch aimed at her stepmother and bumbling stepsisters (excellent performances on pointe from Elivelton Tomazi and Samuel Rodriguez that downplay the camp and dial up the bravura).

Welch abandons the hackneyed rags-to-riches scenario, turning the nameless Prince into a pompous, self-absorbed man-child with a roving eye (Chase O’Connell having way too good of a time smirking and peacocking – until he’s cornered by the stepsisters for a comical pas de trois.) Cinderella sensibly dodges him at the ball, and, in a meet-cute, falls for his secretary who offers her a hankie when she has a sneezing fit. The secretary has a name, Dandini, so we know he’s important; he's danced with diffident grace by Gian Carlo Perez.

Donatelli expresses her growing infatuation with Dandini in lovely stretchy arabesques and every possible variation on pirouette effortlessly strung together. Their falling-in-love duet is punctuated by a full-on kiss initiated by Cinderella – and a loud groan from a child in the audience.

Gems of wit and satire abound. The Dance Instructor (Saul Newport) sent to school the stepsisters for the ball is an incongruous figure of elegance and neurosis. The Prince throws tantrums – expressed in ballet as entrechats with flexed feet – and sends his soldiers around the globe searching for the owner of the abandoned pointe shoe. They serve up a pair of Spanish princesses, who arrive with bare-chested, barelegged Adonis types wearing minotaur masks, and an Arabian princess with two loin-clothed mascots in lion masks. The royals and their subjects are enthralled by these exotic, sinuous dances and wriggle and bob in hilarious synchrony with the dancers. The King (a very funny Stephen Woodgate) waddles around goofily, desperate to secure a bride for his exasperating son. In a satisfying departure from the Perrault story-line, the Stepmother meets a grisly end and there is no redemption for the Stepsisters.

Welch is by no means the first to mine the tale’s rich comedic vein or the harsher satiric one, but he does so with skill and finesse. That said, has no one in the 27 years since this Cinderella was born suggested scrapping the unnecessary misogynistic gestures? The casualness with which men grope a female partner and the way those partners are obliged to brush it off as a joke tarnish those characters. Otherwise, this Cinderella is imbued with a modern sensibility in an imaginative and marvellously quick-witted staging.