Few stories have been so versatile for adaptation than Cinderella. There have been versions for children’s theater, pantomime, opera, comic theater, vaudeville, burlesque, melodrama, risqué sendups, Christmas shows, rock music adaptations with Cinderella as antiheroine, television productions, mainstream and art films in many languages (more than 140 versions just of the fairy tale) and the list extends into the farthest creative horizons.
Ballet, of course, has produced some of the most magnificent versions of the Cinderella story. For decades, a three-act version that Marius Petipa supervised Enrico Cecchetti to set choreography, which premiered in 1893 in St. Petersburg, was a standard. During World War II, Sergei Prokofiev completed his ballet score for Cinderella, which inspired new versions — most notably, Sir Frederick Ashton whose version premiered in London in December, 1948.
This week, Ballet West opens the 2025 portion of its 61st season with the Ashton version of Cinderella, its third time since 2013. But, this year’s production also features new sets and costumes from The Royal Ballet, marking a historic collaboration between Ballet West, Boston Ballet and Cincinnati Ballet. The production will run from Feb. 7-16 at the Capitol Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City and tickets are being snapped up quickly.
“Cinderella is the perfect fairy tale for the ballet,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West artistic director, said in an interview with The Utah Review. “There is the opulence of the palace ball, the comic impact with the greedy and overbearing stepsisters, pathos and sadness. The prince is dissatisfied with his life.” He added that the Prokofiev score, which will showcase the Ballet West Orchestra, led by Jared Oaks, is among his favorites. ”His Romeo and Juliet score is heartbreaking but his music for Cinderella has even greater presence,” he explained.
Sklute added that he has always been struck by the story underlying the provenance of Prokofiev’s music for the ballet, which the Kirov Theatre commissioned. Prokofiev composed it as an ode to his wife while she was separated from him in a Soviet internment camp during the 1930s. In Soviet eyes, Cinderella aligned with the ideological values of the time, as liner notes by Eckhard van den Hoogen for a 1999 two-CD release suggested: “[an] all-suffering working girl who does her chores day in, day out, and never once frowns for a moment or thinks of rebelling… who is content to live with the dream of a better future while merrily lending a helping hand to her oppressors; and who never, never would think of complaining about her fate to earthly or heavenly powers.” Prokofiev wrote, as quoted in Israel Nestyev’s 1960 biography of the composer, “I see Cinderella not only as a fairy-tale character … but also as a real person, feeling, experiencing, and moving among us.”
Cinderella was Ashton’s first full-length ballet and it was the first work outside of the Soviet Union to be set to Prokofiev’s score. As James Wolcott noted in a Vanity Fair piece published in 2014. “Margot Fonteyn wrote in her autobiography: ‘No other choreographer has so completely merged himself with the music. He seems able to divine the composer’s thoughts.’”
In addition to its opulence, Ashton’s version is known for its satirical bite. Of particular note, Cinderella presents one of the greatest examples of dancing en travesti in ballet, as men perform the gender-bending stepsister roles. It is the counterpoint to the dignified, noble image of Cinderella and the prince. In fact, Ashton danced the role of one of the stepsisters in the premiere. Sklute said that Ashton’s version became one of the world’s greatest ballets. “He was driven by the desire to create England’s first grand-scale classic ballet on par with Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake,” he added.
Sklute was instrumental in bringing the Ashton version of Cinderella to the U.S., 58 years after its London premiere. In 2006, Sklute, who was with the Joffrey Ballet Company, relied on his international connections (including a friend and colleague at The Dutch National Ballet) to bring the production stateside, to honor the 50th anniversary of Joffrey’s founding.
After Sklute began his tenure as Ballet West artistic director, he arranged to bring the Ashton version for the first time in 2013 and the company reprised it in 2018. Only four American companies have ever performed the Ashton version.
When efforts began to revamp the sets and costumes for Cinderella, Ballet West joined up with its counterpart companies in Boston and Cincinnati to split the costs of retrofitting the sets (which were originally designed for Covent Garden). The new costumes were created by Alexandra Byrne, the Academy Award-winning costume designer. Tom Pye, who redesigned the sets for The Royal Ballet’s new production premiere in 2023, said in an interview published elsewhere, “Flowers and nature are very present in the design concept and the project has been inspired by Wendy’s [Wendy Ellis Somes, who staged the choreography] beautiful garden.” He added, “I’ve also been looking at the magical fairytale illustrations of Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham: nature is present in all these illustrations, but I’ve made nature ‘bigger’ in the production. There are changes in scale, with people coming through vast flowers and huge meadow grasses framing everything. I’ve set it in a non-specific period, but it has that essential fairytale feel.”
Ashton’s Cinderella has something to hold the attention from the novice patron who is delighted to revisit a fairy tale from their childhood days and share it with family to music aficionados who revel in Prokofiev’s legendary score to the discriminating viewer closely examining the precision and execution of physically demanding ballet technique. Critic Laura Jacobs wrote about Cinderella epitomizes “classical deportment of crisp upper-body inflection and a reverence for pointe work that can only be called Ashtonian — pointes like sewing-sampler needlework, pricks of heightened intimacy and focused poetry–and you have a ballet that imposes its Englishness on any who dance it.”
Sklute said that the company’s current level of artistic talent and technical skill is so broad and deep that three rotating casts of principals and soloists have been selected for the production run. Featuring the entire company as well as dancers from Ballet West II and other trainees, each performance cast will number 75 individuals.
For information and tickets, see the Ballet West website.