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Cinderella Review!

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Ballet Palm Beach’s Cinderella filled with rich performances

Reposted from Palm Beach Daily News
Mon, Nov 4, 2019

By Demetrius Klein
Special to the Palm Beach Daily News

“Ballet Palm Beach brought a clean, smart, chamber version of Cinderella to the Rinker Playhouse at The Kravis Center.

This familiar story, set to the score by Sergei Prokofiev, is told with depth and clarity by the nearly 20-year resident professional ballet ensemble of the Palm Beaches.

The company is able to simultaneously build storyline and develop characters while pruning away any unnecessary pageantry and pomp one would associate with big, evening-length ballets.

The dancers of Ballet Palm Beach are of a uniformly high quality, all mature and deeply expressive in their approach to movement. The go-to stylistic movement choice for Cinderella seems to be a lush, weighted cross between Demi Character and neoclassical.

This unique mix is applied generously across all of the characters and adds a deliciously windswept quality to the entire cast. This is perhaps most evident in the central pas de deux featuring Lily Oj ea Loveland as the title character and Rafael Ferreras as her prince.

Their intimate yet sweeping duet circles, arches and scallops, never settling yet beautifully grounded.

The four fairies of the seasons — Danielle Glynn, Madison Braaksma, Madeleine Miller and Shannon Murray — are also outstanding in their nuance and phrasing during their Act One variations.

Finally, Aurelio Guimaraes and Reinhard von Rabenau are comic gold as the bumbling, preening ugly stepsisters; they manage to project as mean, evil and self-centered while remaining somehow lovable.

Like most two – act story ballets, Cinderella struggles to find a balance in such a short span.

Ballet Palm Beach solves this problem by simply streamlining the narrative while still managing to tell a coherent story.

Since there isn’t a giant corps de ballet to feature in the second act, the usually draggy ballroom sections are moved along in favor of getting to the central narrative action: Cinderella and the prince meeting each other.

It is indeed astounding that this ballet never has more than fifteen dancers onstage at once and yet manages to look com plete and well-crafted at all times.

Let’s hope Ballet Palm Beach can continue to program well-executed and intelligent work as it grows to reach larger audiences.”
Thank you for the review, Demetrius Klein!

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