mon 07/07/2025

fairytales

The Snow Queen, English National Ballet, London Coliseum

Daria Klimentova's icy siren, decked out in Swarovski and flanked by her wolves

If your heart feels frozen while the ice glitters outside, warm it by reading Hans Christian Andersen's sharp, witty and enchanting fairy-tale The Snow Queen, or listen to the best bits of Prokofiev's erratic but often characteristic late ballet The...

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Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, Sadler's Wells

For a choreographer the moment your work becomes a classic is when the audience tells you that you’re casting it wrong. I’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake more than a dozen times for professional reasons since it first took off from Sadler’s Wells...

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The Tsarina's Slippers, Royal Opera House

Larissa Diadkova (Solokha) and Maxim Mikhailov (the Devil) in The Tsarina's Slippers

A vain, capricious girl sends her lunk of a suitor on a quest for the best ruby slippers in the world, while said lunk's mother, the village witch, cosies up to the Devil. It's a whimsical Christmas Eve tale, exuberantly narrated by Nikolay Gogol in...

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Production gallery: Duke Bluebeard's Castle, ENO

English National Opera's new production of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle is photographed here by Johan Persson. Directed by Daniel Kramer, designed by Giles Cadle and lit by Peter Mumford, it updates Charles Perrault's 1697 fairytale to a...

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Duke Bluebeard's Castle/Rite of Spring, ENO

There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the...

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The Sleeping Beauty, Royal Ballet

Critics did not cover themselves with glory after the premiere of The Sleeping Beauty in St Petersburg on a snowy January night in 1890: “We cannot help regretting the means chosen by the theatre directorate in lowering the standard of artistry of...

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