To The Ballet!

On Friday night I had the incredible good fortune to accompany Skidmore to the Opéra Bastille to see the ballet Cinderella. In French it's Cendrillon since the French word for "cinders" is cendres. I don't have an etymological dictionary on me, but I'm willing to be we "stole" the word from French.

The Opéra's website gives this blurb about the performance:

When Rudolf Nureyev created Cinderella at the Paris Opera in 1986, he chose to transpose Charles Perrault’s fairy tale into the realms of 1930s Hollywood. His Cinderella dreams of being a star of the big screen and finds herself propelled into the limelight thanks to the miraculous intervention of a movie producer. The sumptuous sets by Petrika Ionesco lead her into a succession of movie sets from Metropolis to King Kong and offer veiled references to Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx. All the cruelty, fantasy and magic of the fairy tale are to be found here: a wicked stepmother, the diabolical step-sisters and a happy ending for the young girl who charms the young premier and escapes her condition by gaining stardom. At once glamorous, funny and romantic, Cinderella is both a tribute to the cinema and an anthem to innocence, conveyed by one of Sergei Prokofiev’s most beautiful scores.

 I can't expand much on that synopsis other than to say that I was completely blown away! The performances were excellent, the sets and costumes surprising and beautiful, and the music breathtaking.

Here are a couple of photos pulled from the internet: