What could induce a grown-up, rational, childless person to go to see the ballet of Cinderella? You’ll expect to cringe at the panto comedy; on the other hand, you do not want to see verismo child-abuse and uglies-baiting. So what’s left for modern eyes?
Two things: the Prokofiev score — as magical a charmer as Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — which plays with the contrasts of grotesque and beautiful, misery and hopefulness, and glistens with fairy dust in the right places. The overture melts the heart, the waltzes make you want to dance up into the sky. The sweetness of the final bars does that nearly impossible thing in music of expressing ‘and they lived happily ever after’ in a sigh of quiet relief after all the fuss and pother with sisters, shoes and all.
The other key thing is the nature of the fairy tale itself: Cinderella is about love, and about believing in love.
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