Cinderella
Interventions and Inventive Reinventions
Cinderella
by Gioachino Rossini, libretto by Jacopo Ferretti, translated by Christopher Cowell
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 7th October, then on tour until 15th November
Review by Mark Aspen
Cinderella is a story that keeps reinventing itself. Well, it has been around quite a while. It may have started with the ancient Greeks, found its way into a thousand folk tales and, via Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, to the familiar panto story. So Cinderella is quite a venerable lady, but never old. English Touring Opera’s reinvention of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, his reinvention of the Cinderella story is, well … inventive.
However, for director Jenny Ogilvie’s crisp, sparkling and thoroughly enjoyable production, the setting may be a reinvention too far. During the overture, we find ourselves in a museum, a modern one complete with auto-guides. Alidoro, the philosopher who is Prince Ramiro’s mentor and advisor, is seen as the curator. He seems to have been “cancelled” and is being ousted from his post together with a number of the exhibits. He and they obviously do not tick the right boxes. Moreover, everything in this set drips with symbolism. The symbolism seems to say that the circumstances of Cinderella’s world will change. Active overtures are now the norm, but it is pity if it is at the expense of the music, for the audience must have been too busy trying to fathom the significance of all this to enjoy the overture.
This dynamic symbolism continues into the action but does add an intriguing extra dimension to the opera. Packing cases and crates come and go as they are trucked on and off stage. (What though does the enigmatic 33/35, that they are marked with, mean?) Most of the characters’ entrance and exits are also within these trucked packing cases. Again, we have an allegory of change. Alidoro has the function of the fairy-godmother in most versions of the Cinderella story, but rather than a supernatural figure he appear more of an illusionist. Significantly, the packing cases with their dust-sheets often look an illusionist’s trick cabinet.
Fate lends a hand too, the protagonists are wheeled in, not under their own agency. Italian words written on the frieze across the entablature to the classical edifice of the museum say, “My fate declares that my revenge will be their pardon”, pointing towards the eventual denouement of the plot.
Designer Basia Bińkowska’s sharply drawn set has a pristine purposeful feel. As well as the visual metaphors, one of the display cases becomes the props depository. Charlie Morgan Jones’ lighting design has a luminosity that is becoming a trademark of ETO’s sets, and Bińkowska and Morgan Jones have created a distinctive style for the company’s season. Costumes are beige and cream, based on body-stockings, giving the characters a sense of mannequins waiting to be dressed and used.
Putting these cryptic mind-games aside though, Ogilvie tells the story directly, with an energy and a fluency that owes much to her experience as a movement choreographer. My, we really get wonderful, almost balletic, compositions of groups and individuals, movement whose artistry augments the acting, singing and music. The ensemble (Zahid Siddiqui, Sandeep Gurrapadi, Theo Perry and Peter Norris), most of whom have substantial roles in ETO’s companion piece The Coronation of Poppea, really do work as one, musically and in their choreographed movement as well as vocally. Whether as mini-chorus, as supporting characters or as stage hands, they work in perfect unison, to eye-catching effect.
Rossini’s Cinderella is very much in typical opera buffa style: it is comedy. Yet, like much comedy there is a (fairly substantial) steak of cruelty running through it, and a fine counterbalance of pathos. The vocal contribution manifests itself in convoluted patter contrasted with rich lyricism. This production canters along like G&S on a caffeine hit, while entwined with the sadness and the triumph, it packs in a lot of fun.
The cast are superb and their obvious enjoyment of the piece is infectious. With the group movement they need to act as one, and they do. There is much physical theatre and the ability of cast to convincingly freeze is impressive, especially in some cases actually being carried in the frozen poise.
Central to the plot is, of course, the eponymous Cinderella; and mezzo-soprano Esme Bronwen-Smith is outstanding in this part. Her self-assured Marchesa Melibea in ETO’s spring production Il viaggio a Reims was remarkable and she clearly has a penchant for Rossini roles. Cinderella though is a role made for her. We first see her cowed inside one of the crates (in lieu of the traditional inglenook) and Browen-Smith makes an immediate impact. The refined radiance of her singing brings out the full expression of Cinderella’s wistful song about a king, who marries a lowly girl, one of three sisters, choosing her for her innocence and virtue, instead of her social standing. The feeling of the melancholic soulful refrain is totally engaging, for her acting has a disarming reality too. The finely used coloratura and the sympathetic characterisation takes us on Cinderella’s emotion journey, her moment of connection with Ramiro, her confrontations with her sisters, her caution at the opportunities offered by Alidoro and magnanimous clemency (fulfilling the motto on the frieze) at the final solo of the piece.
Alidoro describes himself as the Prince Ramiro’s “fixer” and his fixing is done very enigmatically. When he arrives ex-sacking from the museum at Don Magnifico’s abode, in a warehouse coat, his desk items still in a box under his arm, it is not with the pyrotechnic entrance of a fairy-godmother, but he seizes a good opportunity to reconnoitre for the Prince. Refused something to drink by the step-sisters, he sees clearly the goodness of Cinderella. He soon becomes omniscient about the family. Alidoro is a benevolent manipulator, from whom a little nudge I often all that is needed to push circumstances, often with the help of the deaccessioned museum exhibits. The sonorous bass voice of Edward Hawkins adds gravitas, bringing out the wisdom, the kindness and the humanity of the character.
When, thorough Alidoro’s interventions, Prince Ramiro meets Cinderella, it is love at first sight, and a mutual feeling for Cinderella. Their duet, “Why my heart leaps, I cannot say”, is affecting, and the singing is … heartfelt. Joseph Doody’s fine tenor accentuates the tender moments with Cinderella and his shy approaches, which contrast with his eventual declamations of authority. It is an authority that seems to emerge, via some bravura singing, in spite of itself, for Ramiro is presented as being rather nerdish. He wears shorts and sports Buddy Holly glasses. (Alidoro wears these too, but he is observing everybody.)
Mind you, this makes the acceptance of exchanged personae of Prince Ramiro and his manservant Dandini more credible, helped by the fact that Doody is quite short of statue and Edmund Danon, who plays Dandini, is tall. The subterfuge naturally works for the sisters and all of Don Magnifico’s family. Dandini warms to his temporary change of status, and bit too enthusiastically, and clumsily, in spite of Ramiro’s contrary directions. Danon’s richly athletic baritone brings a purposefulness to the role, which he is clearly enjoying. There is a playful duet with Cinderella when Dandini is getting too overfamiliar with her, and a splendid trio together with the Prince.
Also having fun with their roles are the antagonists, Cinderella’s step-father and her step-sisters. Soprano Nazan Fikret plays the elder sister Clorinda, and mezzo Lauren Young, the younger Tisbe. It is very much a double act and they make a priceless comic pair, but although playing a spoilt couple of airheads, and notwithstanding some explicitly nasty violence towards Cinderella, they do engender a certain sympathy. Perhaps they know they are clutching at straws, as each tries to get the slight edge on the other, particularly when vying for the favours of “the Prince” in the form of Dandini. There is plenty of opportunity for their bright and intricately interwoven duet work. Most of this is in their (substantial) underwear, including pannier hoops, which they negotiate with skilful dexterity.
There is very little to sympathise with in Don Magnifico, a greedy and malevolent slob, who is so puffed-up up in his own importance that he takes to wearing a Bonapartean bicorn hat and frocked tunic. He behaves appallingly to everyone, especially the vulnerable Cinderella, whom he has defrauded of her mother’s inheritance. He laps up the attention of the royal court and the Prince’s generosity, which (puzzlingly) extends to a tray of silver pineapples and mockingly an array of Napoleon busts. Armenian bass Arshak Kuzikyan beds himself into the role of Don Magnifico with some lovely low notes, in both the vocal and characterisation senses. He has good comic timing, witness his recounting of his dream and his riding, backwards, on a full-scale model horse, whilst singing of the ass in his dream. (The horse has his hindquarters to the audience.) It is a pity that Ogilvie has cut the scene with Don Magnifco getting drunk with the staff in the Royal wine cellars, as he would have had a whale of a time with that.
But this production of Cinderella gets on with the story and Canadian conductor Naomi Woo takes the ETO Orchestra at a cracking pace, yet allowing the patter sequences space and the lyrical episodes development. Overall, the music has an appropriately anticipatory feel. (As an aside, there are other opportunities to hear the distracted overture. Rossini was a notorious self-borrower and the music may be heard in other operas, almost all of it in the overture to La gazzetta).
And the story is told with entertaining precision by librettist Christopher Cowell’s translation, which works wonderfully in tandem with the music, and whilst in a modern vein, ever jars.
Within its enigmatic and eclectic setting, Ogilvie’s Cinderella sets the story out directly and entertainingly, and its characters become real. Music and movement, singing and acting come together superbly in a memorable production. A reinvention of a reinvention, it works brilliantly. (But why is there a tiger on a cabinet in the Prince’s palace?)
Mark Aspen, October 2023
Photography by Richard Hubert Smith
Mark Aspen 