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Joffrey Ballet's "Cinderella"

By Laura Molzahn:

What's wonderful about Sir Frederick Ashton's sunny "Cinderella" is his heroine's independence; the few men in the ballet are singularly beside the point. Cinderella's father is kindly but weak, and her prince has no more character than the broomstick she dances with in the kitchen. But Cinderella herself knows her value from the get-go.

The Joffrey --- which holds exclusive rights to perform Ashton’s 1948 three-act story ballet --- stages "Cinderella" for the second time only (the first was in 2006, the piece's U.S. premiere), and it is delicious. Running through February 28 at the Auditorium Theatre, it's well danced and theatrically nuanced under the direction of Wendy Ellis Somes and beautifully tricked out with David Walker's vintage sets and costumes, which the Joffrey acquired four years ago. The Chicago Sinfonietta, conducted by Scott Peck, treats Prokofiev’s sometimes angular, sometimes lissome score with great feeling and sensitivity.

Ashton's remixing of standard versions of the fairytale makes this a grrl-power kind of dance. For the libretto, he relied on Charles Perrault's popular 1697 account --- with some significant changes, like eliminating the evil stepmom. This renders the first act a bit odd: the father, a grown man of sound mind, is completely cowed by the silly stepsisters in Ashton’s comic take on the story, embracing and reassuring his daughter only when they’re not looking. Nice guy, but a wimp.

Ashton also borrowed a few features from the 19th-century version of the fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, in which Cinderella's birth mother speaks from the grave through a hazel tree her daughter plants there. Ashton doesn’t go so far as to have Cinderella’s dead mother talk to her, but his heroine does hang her mother’s portrait on the chimney and place a votary candle on the hearth of the cavernous kitchen. Though we never meet the mother, she is literally a light, a beacon, for the oppressed Cinderella.

Who isn't all that oppressed in Ashton's ballet. In the Brothers Grimm tale, Cinderella is weepy, crying at every turn. Consistently described as good, sweet, and patient, she's also good, sweet, and patient in the ballet --- but seldom weepy. Instead Cinderella immediately reveals an innate self-confidence, especially in her dancing.

For Ashton, the stepsisters' moral failings are part and parcel of their excessive, clumsy movement, played for laughs: their moves are as frilly and overdone as their frou-frou costumes, with lots of gesticulating, wobbly running, and flapping of arms. Pulling out all the stops, Ashton prods them into stumbles, collisions, and Three Stooges-style pranks. At the height of one such scene in the first act, Cinderella steps in and --- with a single decisive gesture, spreading her arms wide --- brings everyone to a halt, just as the old hag/fairy godmother makes her entrance.

Those expansive arms are characteristic of Cinderella's first- and third-act solos in the kitchen, when her spirit transcends her circumstances. Her steps are quick and dainty but completely sure, the solid base for a fluid, expressive upper body. When everyone leaves for the ball, she regards the closed door a little sadly, then makes a flippant "so what?" gesture and executes a sky-high extension facing the audience, releasing it only to stab her toe shoe into the floor defiantly, once, twice, right on the music. On opening night, Victoria Jaiani played the role with the right mix of taut strength and easy freedom, self-effacement and self-assurance.

In Ashton's fairytale, all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking. Well, the prince at least. Despite his money and station, he doesn’t confer power on Cinderella --- he recognizes it. The closest any man gets to power in this "Cinderella" is the jester/emcee at the second-act ball (a highly athletic role well danced by a mischievous Derrick Agnoletti). And he's pretty androgynous. His female counterpart in the first act, the fairy godmother, grounds Cinderella in the natural world (another feature lifted from the Brothers Grimm fairytale), then provides the carriage, horses, gown. But the grace and force that Cinderella unveils at the ball are all her own.

What a novelty: plenty of powerful women while none are evil. Even the wicked stepsisters are men in drag (the hilariously foolish David Gombert and Michael Smith). Ashton --- who used to dance the shy younger stepsister himself --- lavished attention on these two, the bossy older sister and her slightly more demure sibling, the Laurel and Hardy of dance. But it’s a sign of this ballet’s gentle spirit that, when the stepsisters are banished at the end, they half tiptoe/half march offstage hand in hand. Even villains catch a break in Ashton’s generous, forgiving vision.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 02/19/2010 at 12:45 PM