Milwaukee Ballet’s Spellbinding ‘Cinderella’

by

Michael Pink’s ballet adaptation of the Cinderella story has surprising depth, as well as high comedy and great beauty. All of that was evident in the original Milwaukee Ballet production in 2009, even clearer in the 2015 revival, and clearest in a new revival last weekend. From start to finish, I was spellbound.

That’s much to the credit of the dance company. The dancers bring their brains and souls to the roles along with excellent classical technique. Every move looks effortless and feels organic, even the most amazing ones. I laughed whole heartedly at the antics of the stepsisters as performed by Garrett Glassman and Eric Figuerdo. My heart went out to the Prince that Randy Crespo gave us. I saw aspects of my own anxieties and questions in the struggles Lahna Vanderbush was living through as Cinderella, and I felt her courage. I basked in the warmth and generosity of Barry Molina’s magical houseboy Jack.

Pink’s ballets always grow as he revisits and revises. This production had the additional advantage of having Luz San Miguel and Denis Malinkine as rehearsal directors. San Miguel was an original Cinderella and Malinkine rehearsed all three productions with the dancers. They know it inside out. 

The Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra conducted by the great Andrews Sill made Sergei Prokofiev’s complicated score seem as natural as breathing. The blend of music, choreography, and dancing was extraordinarily seamless.

Not Disney

This wasn’t the Disney version. When the softly colored, cartoon painting of a village and palace that serves as the front curtain lifts, we’re in the dark shadows of a graveyard (lighting by David Grill; sets by Bruce Brockman) at the funeral of Cinderella’s mother. My only issue with the show is that unless you’ve read the program, you could miss that fact that the woman (played by Jacqueline Bertault) in the beautiful pink gown (costumes by Peter Cazalet) who appears in a spotlight in an aged tree beside her grave, above the sorrowing Cinderella and her husband (played by Davit Hovhannisyan), is the spirit of that mother and wife. She—and not the anonymous fairy godmother of the movies—brings about her daughter’s transformation.

email newsletter iconStay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.

SIGN UP

Cut to Cinderella’s new life in the household of her father’s second wife. Marize Fumero was the autocratic stepmom, her movements sharp and certain, pointed and en pointe. Her daughters, played by men, are clearly clowns, which frees us to laugh out loud at their generally brainless antics. They’re more afraid of their mom than Cinderella is, and as hard on one another as on Cinderella, who is forced to serve them.

Sweet Jack arrives as a friend and delightful distraction. Henpecked dad enters in tears of regret over this marriage. Cinderella meditates on her mother’s photo. The pink-gowned woman appears behind her in a kind of communion.

A herald (Ben Suzi in great ballet form) brings news of the ball. A Dancing Master (Parker Brasser-Vos) and his Violinist (Alexander Koulos) try to teach the stepsisters dancing. It’s another comic highpoint since the “girls” would rather flirt. All of this is both a choreographic and an acting challenge. Facial expressions are as crucial as energy, strength, flexibility, balance and musicality. 

Start the Magic

Then the magic starts. The house walls open. Mom’s spirit appears and takes Cinderella to an enchanted garden—let’s call it a land of art—where the company’s artists and leading artists, second company members and school children on their way to dance careers, perform against a star-filled night sky. They provide what Cinderella needs to reach her own life’s next stage—the ballet gown, the pumpkin that becomes a coach, the mice that transform into horses, and glittering “glass” point shoes. All the children in this scene had great stage presence. 

Act Two is set in the palace ballroom. The company dancers are courtiers. We meet the gentle Prince, so human, good at grand jetes. We see his lonely solo. Dad, stepmom and stepsisters arrive. We laugh as the stepsisters, utterly out of place, compete for the Prince’s favor. They each get a solo, a mockery of classical ballet. Then Cinderella arrives. She and the Prince start to dance. Suspense builds, as they partner their way to a pas de deux to the grandest music, all you could want in such a sequence, broken as the clock strikes midnight.

Act three is driven by the Prince’s effort to fit the glass point shoe on a woman’s foot. When the stepsisters try ferociously and fail, the stepmom enters from the kitchen with a chopping knife to cut their feet to size. We reach the happy ending with, for me, a thought-provoking, almost meditative pas de deux for Cinderella and the Prince. The world is righted for the moment. Their lives are changed. New questions lie ahead for them but that’s another story.