Christopher Wheeldon
Like Water for Chocolate, Royal Ballet review - splendid dancing and sets, but there's too much plot
Helen Hawkins
Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.Which is not to say it doesn’t provide many pleasures along the way, not least its superb stage pictures, which start right from curtain up, when we see a long line of Frida Kahlos in wedding dresses and Day of the Dead masks, who Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.In our own century, Christopher Wheeldon, who started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet, has had no difficulty straddling the divide between pointework and hoofing – or moonwalking, come to that. In the very same week that this mixed bill devoted to his work opened at the Royal Opera House, he nailed down an Olivier award for his Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the foyer of the Linbury Theatre is an exhibition which gives a very upbeat account of the presence of black dancers in British ballet. Photographs dating back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s show practitioners of extraordinary physicality and verve, with wide, confident smiles.So what happened? On the whole, not much. Yes, Jerry Douglas, aged 19 in 1997, became the first African American officially to join the Royal Ballet. But was he given roles to match his talent? On this point the exhibition text is mute, but my last remembered sighting of Douglas on the Covent Garden stage was as a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed with quirky detail, much of it surely never intended to go anywhere but over the heads of its original child readers.Yes, it may have been written for and about a 10-year-old, but Alice Liddell was clearly a precocious little girl. If eye-boggling phantasmagoria on a scale approaching that of the Olympics opening ceremony is what you want from your Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it. The Winter’s Tale, originally a “romance” in five acts, is widely regarded as a problem play, not only because of its lack of poetic blank verse or cheerful rhymed couplets, but because of its lurching narrative tone, the first three acts filled with bleak psychological drama, the last two comic and frothy. And then there are those challenging stage directions: a statue that mysteriously comes to life, a breathless chase across land and sea, and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s tempting to see the second gala created by Ukrainian-born Ivan Putrov as a reflection of the shift in Ukraine’s fortunes since his first one in March 2022. Somehow, just weeks after Ukraine was invaded, Putrov and his fellow student in Kyiv, Alina Cojocaru, brought the world’s finest principals to the London Coliseum for a show-stopping gala that was as moving as it was finely executed.Now Ukraine languishes for lack of munitions, its hard-won gains in the balance again, and Putrov has had to rally support for his second gala – which funds young arts students in Ukraine – in a fraught Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When George Balanchine said that “there are no mothers-in-law in ballet”, he wasn’t just stating the obvious. He meant that there are some things that simply cannot be expressed in dance. Emotion and nuance are a story-ballet’s native territory; factual complications are a no-go.Yet Christopher Wheeldon has ignored this famous advice in his latest three-acter for the Royal Ballet. The story he chose to adapt, Like Water for Chocolate, the 1989 bestseller by the Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, not only features its fair share of convoluted family relationships but more crucially centres on Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Royal Opera House wasn't taking any chances when it welcomed its first ballet audience since December this week. There was no printed programme on offer, nor even a cast sheet. “Not till October” said the uniformed man on the door. Some ballet companies have learnt the hard way not to trust that newly lifted lockdowns (lockups?) will stay that way for long. They’re in no hurry to spend time and money on printed material that might end up having to be pulped.The programming felt confident though. The soft option for the Royal Ballet’s comeback would have been a comforting classic, but Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Unfazed by yet another forced cancellation, the Royal Ballet has notched up a small triumph over the virus. When what was to have been a performance to a live audience in the Opera House fell prey to new restrictions, it went ahead anyway. With safety protocols for the dancers and orchestra already in place, as well as plans for filming, the only difference was that the public didn’t have to turn out in the rain. And with a single £10 ticket covering everyone around the TV, what a bargain that has turned out to be.For a start, there is the sheer variety of a programme that includes little- Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It might seem odd to laud the entrances and exits of a ballet, but when it comes to stagecraft Christopher Wheeldon is second to none. You lose count of the ingenious ways he finds to shift up to 130 dancers in and out of view at the Albert Hall. Wheeldon created his three-act Cinderella in 2012 for a conventional stage, but for English National Ballet he has reworked it for this vast, non-theatrical O. For once, the wheels of Cinders’ carriage have space to roll.The down side is that the narrative feels overstretched and thin in spite of the pyrotechnics that have been thrown at it – massive Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
You have to hand it to the Americans: they think big. Where the Royal Ballet or ENB might put on three or four new works in the course of a season – because commissions are wildly expensive and a box office risk – San Francisco Ballet has just presented a dozen in the space of two weeks. What’s more, the 12 invited choreographers – four of them Brits or British trained – were given virtually carte blanche to create whatever they liked.Whatever they liked – really? Presumably carte blanche didn’t mean they were free to present the dancers in the buff, but it did mean the stepsmiths weren’t Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Royal Ballet last night presented an evening of Bernstein-scored ballets, two of them premieres by Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon and the other a revival of Liam Scarlett's 2014 Age of Anxiety. Celebrated and accessible composer; celebrated and accessible choreographers; nice centenary bandwagon to hitch them to – surely a recipe for triple success?Or triple... not-success. Last night delivered three pieces that didn't do justice to their music, which doesn't exactly spell triumph for a programme focused on a major composer. Neither McGregor nor Wheeldon appears to have been Read more ...