more 'Cinderella' Reviews AMP Reviews

Bourne has spent another five weeks working on it, and the results are impressive. The plot remains virtually the same, with a few minor tweaks that iron out many confusions. It's virtually the original cast - the sole changes are Isabel Mortimer as the Stepmother instead of Lyn Seymour, and Sarah Barron replacing Emily Piercy as one of the two stepsisters. The choreography, though, is significantly different and makes for a much more coherent whole.

Bourne has gone for slightly broader strokes in the characterisations, which works much better. There simply isn't time or room for detailed developments of all the peripheral characters, and the added grotesquerie makes it far more comic.

The boundaries between Cinderella's "reality" and her "fantasy" of the party at the Cafe de Paris are far clearer now, while junking the uniformity of their look means that the dancers at the Cafe have more impact. Cinderella's mother reappears - this time she's the fairytale princess, while Cinders herself is transformed into a Hayworthesque siren, the confident sexy woman she will never have the courage to be. Similarly her imagination changes her shy, confused pilot into a dashing hero.

The air-raid scenes are much clearer, a confused, terrifying London seen through fear and myopia, while throughout the nightclub scene, one is acutely aware that they are dancing with ghosts. The barefoot women in blue no longer look incomplete, instead their lack of shoes is an indicator of their ghostly status. At the end of the second act, Cinderella "remembers" her mother's murder at the hands of her stepmother, a more satisfactory explanation of why there's an attempted murder in the last act.

The last act is unchanged, as far as I can see. It was the strongest of the original production, but Bourne's revisions give it more impact.

Ben Wright still steals the show in the first act with a skin-crawlingly oleaginous performance, while Will Kemp is superb as the Angel. Wildor and Cooper were on excellent form. The weakest link was Isabel Mortimer's Stepmother, lacking a certain amount of terror. A touch more of the Joan Crawfords might have helped.

But this production is a much-improved version of an already good show. It's due to tour the UK in 2000 - see it.