While the opinions expressed by theatre critics are always different, the five or six reviews that I read on major productions of plays, operas and ballets nevertheless head in the same general direction. How delightful it was, therefore, to read Debra Craine in The Sunday Times and Luke Jennings in The Observer on the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet’s Coppélia!
Neither is enamoured of Roland Petit’s version:
…his chic but empty-headed 1975 French rewrite is so uninvolving… Petit’s Coppélia gives short shrift to plot and even shorter shrift to characterisation.
says Craine. And Jennings:
It’s all intended to be very charming and effervescent, but Petit’s choreography lacks élan and soon becomes tiresomely repetitive.
But on the interpreters they beg to differ. Craine on the Stanislavsky’s Swanhilda wrote,
Kristina Shapran was strange casting as the first-night Swanilda.… [continue reading]
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