Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Cinderellas, like puppies and panettone and port wine, are not just for Christmas. Birmingham Royal Ballet will be touring the UK with its production all spring. Sumptuously set and dressed, David Bintley’s 2010 staging is packed with warmth and humour. Last Saturday’s Hippodrome matinee sometimes lacked the gloss finish that his writing deserves but there were some brilliant-cut solos and conductor Yi Wei and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia gave a fine account of the Prokofiev score.Bintley was weaned on Frederick Ashton’s 1948 version of Perrault’s fairy tale and regularly danced the “shy” ugly sister en travesti back in the early 1990s. The recent run of Cinderella by the Royal Ballet occasionally featured women in these slapstick roles (as Ashton originally planned), but the sight gags lose their force when not danced in drag. Bintley has made his own (female) sisters very nasty — they beat poor Cinders with a broom — but the humour is much stronger. His choreography for both sisters demands a tricky mix of bravura and ineptitude, which was perfectly judged by Saturday’s siblings. Olivia Chang Clarke danced the big blonde one in a horribly convincing fat suit. Every gesture registered and she happily sabotaged her own technique with the merest flex of a foot. By the act two ballroom scene her character was so well established that the footman had only to enter with a pyramid of cupcakes for the audience to laugh delightedly in anticipation of her response. Her skinny sister was played by a punky Rosanna Ely who used the majordomo’s mace for an impromptu pole dance.Like all of Birmingham’s story ballets, Cinderella is gorgeous to look at — and built to last. John Macfarlane, designer of BRB’s matchless Peter Wright Nutcracker, conjures a magical blend of fantasy and reality. Cinders’ kitchen is grimly naturalistic with peeling paint and filthy butler sink but the palace ballroom is unnervingly insubstantial, cornices and baroque doorways suspended within a starry skyscape as if the dream might be whisked away at any moment. Midnight, when it comes, is struck by a fantastical steampunk mechanism, a rogue Tinguely sculpture that ticks away relentlessly to the satirical snarl of the brass.Cinderella’s makeover is disappointingly low-key but everyone else is dressed to the nines in an inky, half-mourning palette of aubergine, indigo and oxblood. The men’s full-skirted coats and their partners’ long-line gowns all swish with surprising lightness, amplifying Bintley’s every step.The ballroom choreography matches the doomy sway of Prokofiev’s waltz and the ensembles for the “stars” are a masterclass in fractal geometry, 16 silvery tutus crystallising into exquisite floor patterns. Yu Kurihara was a striking Winter Fairy but Saturday’s four season fairies were not a matched set which made their pirouettes in canon a bit of a free-for-all. As Cinderella, Sofia Liñares’ barefoot solos were expressive and musical but her duets with Max Maslen’s handsome Prince were blandly generic — though Bintley’s lifts often feel klutzy. One misses the bendy tenderness of Ashton’s love dialogues — half dream, half dream come true — but the closing moments are sublime as the happy couple stroll upstage into the sunrise. ★★★★☆Touring UK and Japan to June 29, brb.org.uk
