Cinderella

Beautiful, kind-hearted, loving Cinderella is sadly condemned to a life in the cinders by her nasty stepmother and heinously ugly stepsisters, all of whom love nothing better than themselves and making Cinderella’s life a misery.  Meanwhile, the handsome prince of the kingdom is about to hold a spring ball.  Naturally, the nasty stepmother is determined that one of her ugly daughters will find favour with the Prince and make him her husband.  So, dressed in their finery, all three lurch off to the ball with Cinderella’s father in tow, leaving Cinderella with only sadness and lost dreams for companions.

Queensland Ballet’s Cinderella, one of the most beautifully engaging productions yet of the ballet, well demonstrates artistic director Li Cunxin’s gifts in training some of Australia’s finest ballet dancers.  Not only are Cinderella (Laura Hidalgo) and the Prince (Victor Estévez) all you could hope for, dancing exquisitely and falling in love with subtlety and demure grace; the Fairy Godmother (Yanela Piñera) is utterly and delicately enchanting, bringing the magic of fairydom to the stage, along with the fairies and dragonflies who also inhabit the fairy glade.  And not to be missed is the court jester (Kohei Iwamoto), dancing with superb fluidity and using entertainingly comic facial expressions.  As for the stepsisters: two more adorably clumsy, inept, and ugly sisters (Camilo Ramos and Alexander Idaszak) with no redeeming features you cannot hope to find.  And they and several of the Prince’s retinue manage to convey in mere gestures a degree of detail as astonishing as it is amusing.

Audiences hoping to be enchanted by the costumes will not be disappointed: they’re perfectly sumptuous.  And the lighting and very cleverly designed sets, transporting the onlooker from the drab, unhappy surrounds of Cinderella’s world to those of a fairy glade and a Prince’s palace, saturate entire scenes with magical colour.

This production is not only charming and gratifyingly true to the original tale; it’s also unexpectedly humorous.  You will not regret treating yourself to an escape into its magical world, where dreams can come true.

Michele E. Hawkins

Image: Laura Hidalgo, in Cinderella.  Photographer: David Kelly.