Cinderella in London

Outside the drab yellow walls of the Covent Garden Opera House last week, Londoners stamped their feet in the foot-numbing chill. Some had been waiting six hours for the gallery door to open. Backstage, Choreographer Frederick Ashton, in a skirt and a high wig, rushed around with last-minute instructions. The occasion was the first new full-length, classic-style ballet Western Europe had seen in 50 years.

The orchestra glided into the opening bars of Sergei Prokofiev's score and the curtain went up on Cinderella. Then, for two hours, an eager-to-be-enchanted audience found plenty of reason to be. With her thistledown lightness and grace, pert, piquant Moira Shearer (dancing star of the movie Red Shoes) danced well and looked the part of Cinderella. Her two ugly sisters, one of them danced by Choreographer Ashton himself, couldn't have been uglier, and her prince (Michael Somes) couldn't have been more charming. Reported the London Daily Mail: "The curtain calls seemed to go on almost as long as the performance."

Most of the calls were for the Sadler's Wells top choreographer, lean, 42-year-old Freddie Ashton, whom London critics were quick to praise as "the first Englishman to devise a full-length ballet." He had used most of the gay, though sometimes brittle and bony score that Prokofiev had composed on a Kremlin commission during the war, but he had taken nothing of the Bolshoi Theater's spectacular and even longer ballet. A typical difference: while Ashton has his hero stay close to home, the Russians sent their Prince Charming chasing around the world after the glass slipper's owner so that they could have a whirl at Turkish, Spanish and African dances. Said Ashton: "The trouble with most long ballets is that no matter how good they are, they tend to wear an audience out." His trick: "We start off with a heavy dose, let each succeeding act get shorter & shorter." It worked. At week's end, the next twelve performances of Cinderella were solidly sold out, and three weeks more were added to the schedule.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.