Sleeping Beauty - Opera House - 28/01/08 by Alex Beaumont

I’ve never really liked the Opera House. It’s steep and narrow, dark, a little dingy and—most crucially—the stage is frustratingly small. Yes, any venue’s shortcomings are dictated as much by whim and personal taste as by anything more serious. And the average play or musical might not require too many performers to be onstage at any one time and so the seams will remain mostly intact. Ballets, however, often require a great deal of space, and Sleeping Beauty — which is being staged at the Opera House until 30th January—is no exception.

Aside from the prince and princess—played by husband and wife Kristina Terentieva and Alexei Terentiev—there are six fairies, a king and queen, four male courtiers, numerous bystanders and a twelve-strong chorus onstage during the busiest movements. The promotional literature shows the Chisinau National Ballet spread across a spectacularly spacious stage, ideally suited for this production.

Sadly, its time in Manchester will be spent at the Opera House. The chorus will be compressed to the point that their extensions will leave you less awed at the dancers’ physical ability and more terrified that they’ll become hopelessly entangled with one another. The most exciting choreography—and there isn’t much of it—will appear staid, neutered even. The already uninspiring design will appear pointlessly cluttered, and the sense of impending collision will be heightened to an almost unbearable level. Put bluntly, in booking the Opera House for this production Ellen Kent and Ballet International made a serious cock-up.

What’s worse is that not all of Sleeping Beauty’s failings can be put down to the venue: the dancing, sometimes, would appear lacklustre even to the uninitiated. While Terentieva and Terentiev are fine as the princess and the prince (their talents remain mostly untested, but what they do do, they do well), other performances are a little on the sloppy side. Things weren’t helped when one of the chorus slipped and ended up on her backside.

The resulting production is unpolished at best. Normally classic ballets like Sleeping Beauty are worth forking out for simply to please the kids. Considering what’s on offer here, however, my advice is that you wait for Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker or Birmingham Royal’s Swan Lake, both of which will appear at The Lowry over the next couple of months. And the stage is bigger there, too.