QUOTES & REVIEWS
Awards 2011
OLIVIER AWARDS 2011
Nominated for Best New Dance Production
MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS AWARDS 2011
Nominated for Best New Dance Production
THEATRE AWARDS UK 2011 (formally The TMA Awards)
WINNER for Outstanding Achievement in Dance
UK National Press Quotes - December 2010
Daily Telegraph 
Times
Time Out
Guardian
"What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created. This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding show in London. A magnificent show and Bourne's finest hour"
Ismene Brown The Arts Desk
‘A perfect, warming Christmas treat’
Daily Telegraph
‘A gripping theatrical spectacle. Bourne does something wonderful: he scatters love, like fairydust. This Cinderella turns into another kind of fairytale – the miracle of love in war’
Guardian
‘A sweeping wartime romance’
The Times
‘A big-hearted ballroom blitz. Cinders sets the stage alight in Matthew Bourne’s wartime revival’
Observer
‘Cinderella fills me with optimism for the future of dance. Let's celebrate Matthew Bourne, the great showman of British dance’
Daily Telegraph
‘At Bourne’s best, the action is tied so directly to the music, it’s as if Prokofiev wrote the score just for him. This ‘Cinderella’ has enough romance, fantasy and fun to keep us hooked.’
Time Out
‘An ingenious set that brings 1940s London roaring to life. It works brilliantly’
Metro
"Truly one of the most beautiful and engaging things that i've ever seen on the stage, laden with wit and charm and the very cleverest of visual storytelling"
Rowan Atkinson
Matthew Bourne's Cinderella, Sadler's Wells
Friday, 10 December 2010
by Ismene Brown
What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created in his Blitz-era Cinderella - truly a magical ride created from what was in its original 1997 form a pumpkin waiting to be transformed.
This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding Christmas show in London, filled with a huge love of the city and a moving homage to humanity in wartime. Old newsreel, an eye for Powell and Pressburger style, some stunning sets, and - Bourne’s masterstroke - a brilliantly filmic recording of Prokofiev's score in sound-surround with much atmospheric enhancement all make this an exceptional evening out.
The beauty of Bourne’s thinking is that Cinderella could be anyone, she’s been picked out by a white-clad Angel, to be freed from an oppressed life and allowed to find happiness. There are many echoes of old weepie movies: the Angel (a nicely sly, otherworldly Christopher Marney) and the wounded pilot who catapults out of the sky hint at A Matter of Life and Death, the deliciously feelgood finale at Paddington station rights the sad wrong done to railway stations in Brief Encounter, and surely Cinderella’s twinkling shoes awoke at least a little flicker of The Red Shoes in Bourne’s imagination.
Set, music, drama and choreography seem perfectly intertwined, the masterstroke being the sound experience, with bombs and sound atmosphere recorded into the music to create what's practically a film score, and making one watch and sense the stage in a fresh and new way.
Lez Brotherston’s set is a virtuosic evocation of black-and-white Forties movies into which, as love and hope blossom, lighting designer Neil Austin floods the colours of the Union Jack, rich blue, arresting red and a soft golden ivory. Over it all hangs a faint projection of the twisted London skyline of St Paul's which adds the sense (along with the sound manipulations) that you the spectator have been plunged back in time.
There is a sensationally realised Act Two set for a bombed and wrecked Café de Paris, which - before your disbelieving eyes - runs backwards and reassembles for the action before once again disintegrating, with even more impact. The dingy grey townhouse where Cinderella lives has already been damaged by war, the mantelpiece slips dangerously, the grey brick walls are shattered at the sides. Her dad is a First World War casualty, it seems, barely sensate in a wheelchair, a figure of mockery for his black-hearted Cruella de Ville of a wife, the glorious Michela Meazza, eyecatching in fabulous Galliano-type outfits (one hat is an upturned stiletto shoe), with all the poisonous glamour of Joan Crawford at her meanest.
The two stepdaughters are her pallid clones, while Cinderella (the very sweet Noi Tolmer last night) is a dumpy teenager in woolly grey school uniform with thick glasses whose dreams turn a dressmaker’s dummy into almost Mr Right (pictured right, Kerry Biggin and Sam Archer). A large and pleasing assortment of awkward silly-ass chaps are part of the circle, stepbrothers and various boy and girlfriends, who generate both some nice comedy and the generational gap in dance styles, their jitterbug being interrupted by Stepmother insistent on teaching them the tango. It’s one of many incidental examples of Bourne’s musical responsiveness to what sometimes appear in other dance versions of the Prokofiev to be problems.
One might feel that Bourne's contemporary dance style is stretched too far in Act Two, but again and again I felt like saying, “Yes!” as he used a little musical phrase with perfect impact to introduce an action or start a new incident.
Cinderella wears a glorious dress (pictured below, Kerry Biggins with Christopher Marney as The Angel), but basically she's dancing with squaddies and ordinary Londoners, not with heroes. This is arrestingly so in the so-called “seasons” numbers of Act One and in Act Three, whose music is often cut by ballet choreographers. Bourne’s thoroughly absorbed the moods of the music, as well as its programmatic associations, and with Paul Groothuis’s superb aural enhancements he’s delivered and underlined both the nightmarish terror lurking in the score and its deep soulfulness.
The sounds of war correlate directly to Prokofiev’s own experience, and it’s profoundly moving to have the bleakness turned into images, and therefore the tenderness and yearning of some of those melodies emerge even more keenly. The wounded pilot’s character is only fully revealed in a clever moment at the end (he and the father have had identical experiences), but his shellshocked roaming through a blasted and terrified London provides some marvellous scenes that make Prokofiev’s music shine in a brilliant new chiaroscuro. The hectic “autumn” music becomes a frightening pursuit by what seem to be ravenous dogs, men in snout-shaped gasmasks. The wanderings of Act The is a lost, scary peregrination by the wounded man through a hellish London, assaulted by prostitutes and pimps in Oxford Circus Tube and on Waterloo Bridge, every incident scrupulously finding a new musical insight.
As does the playing itself on this unique recording - this is a vivid and involving interpretation, and it turns out to be by Bourne’s own trusty band of players under Brett Morris, who have consistently delivered top standards in all his shows live. They won’t mind, I hope, if I say this is their finest hour, because their playing has an excitement, drive and detail in this embellished recording that wouldn’t have been possible live from the pit and will make many of us listen to Prokofiev’s music with freshly sensitised ears.
How far Bourne has come since 1997, when this Cinderella seemed to be the potentially great show that had somehow got away. Much more a character piece than a ballet rendition, that Cinderella didn’t evince 10 years ago the full stage command for all its characters. But since then Bourne’s mastered and expanded his skills with the brilliant Play Without Words and his other popular productions. If Swan Lake was an acutely rewritten evocation of one man's soul, Cinderella is a love letter to the London that survived the war, a deeply felt expression of confidence in humanity. This is a magnificent show, and Bourne’s finest hour.
IN PRAISE OF … Matthew Bourne
The ballet choreographer's new version of Cinderella demonstrates that there is more to him than the populist touch
Editorial
The Guardian, Friday 10 December 2010
Talking about his souped-up, steamy adaptation of Carmen (or Car Man, as it was renamed) 10 years ago, Matthew Bourne remarked: "We've got sexy men and sexy women, so whatever you're into, it'll be on view. Something for everyone – that's what I go for."
This is the popular view of the ballet choreographer: the saucy crowd-pleaser, the populist with a line in innuendo. Bits of Bourne's biography bolster this image: his upbringing in the outer reaches of north-east London, his early days as a theatre usher and comparative lack of formal training, and his work on stage versions of Edward Scissorhands, Mary Poppins and Oliver! But there is more to the man than a popular touch, as demonstrated by the revival of his spin on Cinderella, now at Sadler's Wells.
What makes the production fly is Bourne's insight that Prokofiev's score is really a wartime piece – and his decision to stick the dances in the middle of London's blitz. So the Prince is a wounded pilot, and there are set pieces in a swanky nightclub that gets blasted to smithereens and a train station as men go off to destroy themselves in battle; the dancers' steps are executed with a military pace and precision, as if their time is running out. Part drama, part dance, the result is accessible but also cheekily subversive.
Bourne once told an interviewer of his realisation that people go to the theatre "to have this gut-wrenching emotion. And I saw that I could give it to them. I could move people and I wanted to." A rare case of the right gift in the right hands.
Awards and Reviews from the 1997 West End Production and the 1999 Los Angeles Production...
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 (as The Angel)
"A dazzling spectacle...fresh and vital, hilarious, profound and stunningly original. Bourne's incomparable theatrical flair adds up to a compelling entertainment"
THE 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”
L A TIMES
“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.
