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OLIVIER AWARDS 1998
Outstanding Achievement in Dance - Lez Brotherston
BACKSTAGE GARLAND AWARDS 1999
Choreography- Matthew Bourne
Scenic Design - Lez Brotherston
Lighting Design - Rick Fisher
Costume Design - Lez Brotherston
LA DRAMA CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 1999
Best Choreography - Matthew Bourne
Outstanding Performance - Will Kemp
"A dazzling spectacle...fresh and vital, hilarious, profound and stunningly original. Bourne's incomparable theatrical flair adds up to a compelling entertainment"
LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Breathtaking choreography..the most thrilling stage experience in town"
NEWS OF THE WORLD
“Bourne’s talent for translating most everything he comes across – theatre, film, literature and life – into the idiom of dance comes vibrantly alive in this passionate, witty and tender retelling of the classic story”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“Heartbreaking….One leaves the theatre talking of Bourne’s extraordinary overlap of dream and realism: an overlap that takes one back to the core of the Cinderella story and Prokofiev’s score
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“The set and costumes recall a golden age of cinema… designer Lez Brotherston takes Cinderella from the family home, through a blackout, to the faded glory of the dance hall, to the blitzed streets of the 1940s London, to the sterility of a convalescence ward and finally to wartime film’s setting for riding off into the sunset; the departures hall at a train station”
TIME MAGAZINE
“Bourne has made a war time story accessible to a post war generation…Cinderella has complexity, subtlety and surprises and is a worthy sequel to Swan lake”
THE EVENING STANDARD
"A dazzling depiction of the dream of finding love"
LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Matthew Bourne appears to have done it again…. Another crowd pleaser and for all the right reasons”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
“Bourne’s Cinderella is still a deeply affecting homage to both composer and English wartime. It deserves to be a popular success”
THE DAILY MAIL
“Daring… a hip, fluidly cinematic sensibility. More like a Broadway blockbuster than a traditional ballet… a Valentine to the power of love”
THE LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
“The dancing is splendid, the waif-like Cinderella and her dazed pilot lover emerge as real-life and genuinely passionate figures”
THE STAGE
"Dazzling...More masterful than Swan Lake.... seduces the senses and touches the heart"
SAN FRANCISCO OBSERVER
"Bourne's Cinderella will amuse, amaze and convince you that everything old can indeed be made new again"
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
“The music, with its heavy industrial rhythms and ominous orchestration, has always had an intractable harshness for a fairy tale ballet. Bourne makes us hear it as a wartime score, exploiting all the elements that many other choreographers try to ignore”
THE GUARDIAN
"Dazzling images. A wonderful conceipt"
VARIETY
“Cinderella sparkles with the same clever pop art visuals, wry cultural observations and propulsive narrative drive that made Swan Lake such an unstuffy, high concept pleasure…. Truly inspired storytelling”
THE LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
"Wonderful... Bourne's vision is glorious"
CALIFORNIA TELEGRAPH
“Dazzling...startlingly original. Bourne has invented a new kind of musical, using the conventions of ballet and film instead of showbiz...A triumphant success”
THE OBSERVER
"Stunning, fresh and timeless"
PASEDENA STAR NEWS
"A work of considerable genius"
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
"Matthew Bourne is the toast of the town. This show is stunning"
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
NOT YOUR BASIC FAIRY TALE
The Advocate, May 25, 1999 Review by Allan Ulrich
After his homoerotic Swan Lake, choreographer Matthew Bourne evokes the ravages of World War II in Cinderella
Matthew Bourne, the English choreographer whose Swan Lake put hairy-chested swans in every living room in America, has returned to these shores with a dazzling modern-dress version of another ballet classic, Cinderella, and if the results are somewhat less fleshy and Freudian than its notorious predecessor, this latest effusion from Bourne's superb company, Adventures in Motion Pictures, is no less unorthodox and provocative.
Set amid the London rubble during the World War II blitz, this Cinderella, introduced in London's West End in 1997, has found a home away from home at Los Angeles's Ahmanson Theatre, where artistic director Gordon Davidson put his reputation with his board on the line before the American premiere of Swan Lake two years ago ("Guys dancing around in feathers to Tchaikovsky? You must be kidding"). This time there will be less consternation, less skin, and a bit more mystification. Everybody may know the basics of the Cinderella story, but no single dance version of that ballet is as familiar as the Swan Lake that Bourne so cunningly transgressed in the earlier piece; he was free here to go his own way.
What the two productions share, however, is an almost hallucinatory quality in the storytelling. The characters aren't so much propelled by the narrative as trapped in it. What drew Bourne to the era of the Battle of Britain was Sergei Prokofiev's score, written during the same period, during the most stressful days of the war. The music is among the Russian composer's darkest and most troubled creations; most choreographers working on Cinderella simply ignore that tone and deliver indifferent ballets.
At the Ahmanson, searchlights rather than fairy wings illuminate the night sky; the sound of bombs prefaces each of the three acts; air-raid alert signs flash in Lez Brotherston's award-winning, stunningly conceived designs. The heroine--danced by the exquisite Sarah Wildor, on loan from London's Royal Ballet--is a dreamy, kindhearted, bespectacled slavey in a household teeming with Bright Young Things and hints of pansexual pastimes, all under the thumb of a socialclimbing gorgon of a stepmother. And Cinderella's prince has become Harry, a shell-shocked Royal Air Force pilot who stumbles into her house during a blackout and emerges clutching one of the jeweled pumps that Cinderella has temporarily pinched from the stepmother. In the role of Harry, Adam Cooper, the hunky chief swan of Swan Lake, is barely recognizable behind the David Niven mustache.
It is the world of Noel Coward and Evelyn Waugh on the brink of dissolution, a society determined to dance its way to the edge among the falling bombs. Cinderella's fairy godmother has become a guardian angel (Will Kemp) with bleached hair and shiny white suit; he escorts her to the ball in a motorcycle sidecar as gas-masked air-raid wardens comb the debris for bodies. A bomb ends the festivities at midnight, and Harry seeks the owner of the jeweled shoe through the streets and Underground stations, only to be reconciled with his true love in a convalescent home.
Bourne's most striking innovation is the second act, where he flirts with a cinematic dream structure. The cheesy dance hall through which Londoners romp seems to resurrect itself from the ashes at the beginning, and Cinderella fantasizes herself onto the dance floor and into bed with her swain. The result is a sweeping postcoital duet that leavens Bourne's satirical group numbers with a sweet sincerity. In case you didn't guess it from Swan Lake, this is one dance maker who puts his heart where his sole is.
Ulrich is the dance and classical-music critic for the San Francisco Examiner.
