Christopher Wheeldon returns to London with glam reworking of Cinderella

With a clutch of Tony Awards under his belt, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is back in town and having a ball, he tells Lyndsey Winship
Golden year: Christopher Wheeldon sees his reworking of Cinderella for Dutch National Ballet make its UK premiere this week (Picture: Angela Sterling)
Angela Sterling
Lyndsey Winship7 July 2015

Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon remembers being starstruck at this year’s Tony Awards in New York. “I was on the red carpet and I had to do a bunch of interviews,” he says, “and I couldn’t concentrate because Helen Mirren would walk past, then Jennifer Lopez would walk past and, oh my God there’s Chita Rivera. I had to try to stay cool. I’m from Dorset. Things like this don’t really happen to me.”

Except they do, evidently, now that he has become a bit of a star himself. Wheeldon’s directorial debut, a stage version of the 1951 Gene Kelly film An American in Paris, picked up four Tonys at last month’s ceremony, including Best Choreographer, from a total of 11 nominations.

It’s fair to say the show has been a hit, and Wheeldon’s career has moved up a significant notch, breaking out of the dance-world bubble to bring ballet to Broadway.

Wheeldon hopes An American in Paris will come to London (more on that later) but in the meantime you can see another of his reworkings of a well- known story, Cinderella, created for Dutch National Ballet in 2012 and getting its UK premiere tomorrow.

It’s a gorgeously glam production, set to Prokofiev’s cinematic score, with huge sets by Brooklyn-based Brit designer Julian Crouch (Shockheaded Peter, Jerry Springer: The Opera), which Wheeldon says will only just fit on the Coliseum’s vast stage. Wheeldon’s slant on the story comes from the original Brothers Grimm version rather than the pantomime tale most familiar here (or the Frederick Ashton ballet that’s in the Royal Ballet’s rep). There’s no fairy godmother, for a start, no pumpkin, and the ugly sisters aren’t even very ugly. “Actually, they aren’t written as grotesque,” Wheeldon points out. “They’re contemporaries of Cinderella, they’re the same age. I always found it slightly odd that the two sisters are usually played by 40-year-old men.”

Big winner: Wheeldon picked up four Tonys for his version of An American in Paris (Picture: Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
Theo Wargo/Getty Images

In this telling, the prince is railing against the expectations of a royal life and meets Cinderella in the first act, without her knowing about his regal status. “They meet as man and woman, on the same level,” says Wheeldon. “They’re still very much fairytale people but they’re more fleshed out. Cinderella is less of a victim, in a way. She’s more master of her own future, which was important to me.” And there’s more than one love story. “It’s more complex than your average Cinderella, for sure,” he says.

Instead of the fairy godmother, Cinderella is visited by the four Fates, sent by the spirit of her dead mother. In an Amsterdam studio, I watch Wheeldon rehearsing the quartet of dancers in movement that is deeply balletic but has an unrestrained freedom and a contemporary accent. As more dancers take to the floor, Wheeldon’s clear blue eyes are trained on their every move. He gets up to demonstrate the details, a particular angle of the arm or tilt of the head, and he encourages the dancers to get inside their characters. “Feel gorgeous, don’t just ‘play’ gorgeous,” he tells one.

Wheeldon, 42, trained in London and danced briefly with the Royal Ballet before moving to New York. He originally made his name as a choreographer of beautiful, abstract one-act ballets, first at New York City Ballet, where he was resident choreographer from 2001-2008, then as an artistic associate at the Royal Ballet and for his own short-lived company Morphoses, as well as for major companies around the world.

In the past three or four years he has made a decisive move away from pretty abstraction towards storytelling and grand narratives (including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale), something that had almost gone out of vogue with choreographers making new work. “I think it certainly was seen as old -fashioned,” says Wheeldon.

“Through the Nineties and the Noughties, [narrative] was frowned upon as a bit has-been. But storytelling is timeless. People love stories. We flock to the movies, to the theatre, to musicals. So why not have more of it in the ballet? Abstract work is wonderful because you can do whatever you like but I’m enjoying the challenge of making a story come to life on stage.”

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Wheeldon is unashamed about his desire to entertain. “Sometimes there’s criticism in the ballet world that [work] is too populist,” he says. “But it comes down to: who are we choreographing for? Are we making ballets for ourselves, are we making ballets for the critics, or are we making ballets for the public? I know I’m making ballets for the public. The ultimate prize is not standing there holding a Tony Award. It’s when the audience stand up on their feet because they have been genuinely transported by a production. If you get four claps and the curtain comes down and you get a great review, well, it’s always nice to a get a great review,” he says, “but have you really connected with people?”

An American in Paris has certainly connected with people, filling 1,800 seats a night at New York’s Palace Theatre, and Wheeldon is delighting in bringing ballet to a new audience. “We’re starting to get the tourist audience now and the 12-minute ballet in the second act gets the biggest ovation of the night. There are nightly comments such as: ‘I didn’t know ballet could be like that!’”

Having never directed anything before, let alone a Broadway musical, An American in Paris was a big leap for Wheeldon and he was full of doubt about his abilities. “But I felt like I had a responsibility to try,” he says. “There was a great idea that maybe this could be a really strong dance-driven show on Broadway, which there hadn’t been for a long time. It felt like an opportunity not to be missed.”

Wheeldon has had talks about bringing the show to London but there are issues of logistics and timing to sort out, finding a big enough stage and also the right cast. The show has launched a second career for its British leading lady, Leanne Cope, a ballet dancer who spent more than a decade in minor roles at the Royal Ballet but is now in the spotlight, singing and acting for the first time on stage.

If Wheeldon is to put together a London show plus a touring company, and perhaps another international cast, he’ll need up to eight leading couples. So he’s counting on the fact that there are other as yet uncovered talents out there such as Cope: top-level ballet dancers who can also act and sing. As Wheeldon himself knows, just because you haven’t done something before, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. New York’s can-do spirit seems to have rubbed off on him.

Tony success potentially opens up a lot of doors for the choreographer. And although the initial thrill of infiltrating celebsville quickly wore off the thrill of reaching a mass audience has not. “The actual Tony ceremony is five hours long,” he says. “By the fourth hour, you get to the point where it’s ‘Oh yeah, there goes J-Lo, she must be going to the loo. Yeah, Helen Mirren, whatever’.”

Dance is sometimes seen as the Cinderella of the arts. “I’d like it to have more of a chance [to be seen],” he says, “and I feel like I’m someone who can do that.” Wheeldon has theatre ideas in the works, something with a new score and new script, and he’s particularly keen to work in film. “When I have some time — if ever I have some free time ever again — I’d love to take a film-making course,” he says. Maybe that next red carpet will be at the Oscars.

Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella is at the Coliseum, WC2 (020 7845 9300, eno.org.uk), from Wednesday Jul 8 until Saturday Jul 11

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