Recent Stories with tag cinderella

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Kylee Kitchens as Fairy Godmother and soloist Rachel Foster as Cinderella with PNB School students and Company dancers in Kent Stowell’s "Cinderella" (Photo © Angela Sterling)

This is a ballet that draws adorable little moppets like nothing else. They may fade a little at an evening performance; I saw a few fathers heading out at second intermission with daughters deep in slumber over their shoulders. That's all right: They've seen the stepsisters carrying on, the carriage trip and ball's extravagant romance, by then.

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Cinderella (at McCaw Hall through Feb. 13) is like a hyper-elaborate dessert menu option, just slightly piquant, unfailing sweet, and technically impressive. Now, as a child-free curmudgeon, I don't really go in for this sort of thing, but it is actually a remarkable production. The combination of Martin Pakledinaz's glittering array of form-fitting, flowing, and wedding-cake-fantasy costumes, Tony Straiges' cinematic projections and gauzy scrims (plus the fairytale carriage), and Randall G. Chiarelli's warm-glow lighting pile on top of each other like layers of fruit and icing on a Prokofiev and Stowell cake. 

If there's a weakness to Kent Stowell's on-the-bright-side telling, it's that nothing all that bad happens, people just like to dance. Cinderella has fond, beyond-a-scrim memories of her parents in former days to compensate for being ordered around like a servant, and she's so good-natured that even being skipped over for the ball doesn't really get her down. She's still playful with her stepsisters.

The dramatic stakes are just not very high--and as if to get downplay that by searching out extremes, Stowell's choreography gives some scene-stealing dancing to characters who have little dramatic reason for being (coughs, looks at jester), and explodes your head with the cute of little bug/fairy kids and clock/pumpkin children dancing like the most sincere pumpkin patch ever come to life. The little ones have real choreography to perform, and their applause is well-earned.... (more)