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Liam Scarlett's Frankenstein, set to a commissioned score by Lowell Liebermann, will be beamed live to cinemas tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18 at 7:15 pm BST.

Since co-producer San Francisco Ballet will not perform the ballet until February 2017, the screening has been embargoed in the United States. However, if you live close to the Canadian border, it will be screened there on Sunday, May 22. If you live close to the Mexican border, screenings there will take place on July 2 & 3.

http://www.roh.org.uk/showings/frankenstein-live-2016

Victor Frankenstein - Federico Bonelli

Young Victor - Sacha Barber

Elizabeth Lavenza - Laura Morera

Young Elizabeth - Skya Powney

Alphonse Frankenstein (Victor’s father) - Bennet Gartside

Caroline Beaufort (Victor’s mother) - Christina Arestis

William Frankenstein (Victor’s younger brother) - Guillem Cabrera Espinach

Madame Moritz (The Frankensteins’ housekeeper) - Elizabeth McGorian

Justine Moritz (Madame Moritz’s daughter) - Meaghan Grace Hinkis

Young Justine - Lauren Molyneux

Henry Clerval (Victor’s friend) - Alexander Campbell

The Professor - Thomas Whitehead

The Creature - Steven McRae

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Conductor - Koen Kessels

Choreography: Liam Scarlett
Music: Lowell Liebermann
Designer: John Macfarlane
Lighting designer: David Finn
Projection designer: Finn Ross

The digital program is available free of charge with the promo code FREEFRANK.

http://www.roh.org.uk/publications/frankenstein-digital-programme

In Europe the ballet will be screened live, except in Finland (May 22) and Bulgaria (July 12). In addition the ballet will be shown outdoors and free of charge at eight locations in the UK: http://www.roh.org.uk/about/bp-big-screens/venues

In Canada the ballet will be screened on Sunday, May 22 at Cineplex and Landmark cinemas.

In Australia it will be screened on July 1, 2, 3 & 6.

In Mexico it will be screened on July 2 & 3.

The ROH site also lists a screening in Cape Town on July 3 and in Montevideo on September 29.

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Liam Scarlett's Frankenstein, set to a commissioned score by Lowell Liebermann, will be beamed live to cinemas tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18 at 7:15 pm BST.

Since co-producer San Francisco Ballet will not perform the ballet until February 2017, the screening has been embargoed in the United States... [\quote]

"Embargoed"...as if it is such a precious piece of cargo! The American public must not find out what a stinker of a ballet this is before the SFB run...or the inevitable showing at the Kennedy Center in 2018.

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Remember the critics have a long and inglorious history of being wrong about new ballets. Neither Sleeping Beauty or Manon were well received by the critics initially. This ballet is neither an abject failure nor an overwhelming masterpiece but audiences composed of ordinary ballet goers who pay for their own tickets like it. In fact I haven't heard such unforced enthusiasm for a new work for a very long time. I bought tickets for several performances in order to see the different casts and I have heard similar reactions at each of the performances that I have attended. Unlike the performances of the Schecter ballet "Untouchable" which I attended last year these enthusiasts were not a small group in one part of the auditorium who only made their presence felt on the first night.

I have no doubt that it will be improved by judicious pruning which will tighten it up but it has received a very enthusiastic response from the paying public in its current state on each of the three night that I have attended . The ballet is about Mary Shelley's book rather than the mid 1930's Hollywood horror film starring Boris Karloff. It will be interesting to see what gets cut and what US critics and audiences think of it.

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I agree that Scarlett's Frankenstein is neither great nor horrible. I should note that I have seen only the filmed version, so I can't know what sort of effect it has in live performance, and further that I haven't read the novel since my freshman year in university, and that I have not seen most of the movie versions.

The performances by the first cast are good. Bonelli looks convincingly young enough for his part, and if Morera does not, her sense of terror in her scene with the Creature feels intense and real. Meaghan Grace Hinkis as Justine and Alexander Campbell as Henry are very sympathetic.

John Macfarlane's designs are gorgeous. My only reservation would be that since Victor wears mostly black in the first two acts, it was hard to make out his dancing in the animation scene at the end of Act 1. Bonelli seemed to be dancing up a storm, but only his face and white-sleeved arms were visible.

The primary liability is the music. Liebermann's score is not unattractive, but it also isn't very distinctive, with little rhythmic drive to underpin the choreography. Only William's birthday party scene in Act 2 has a period flavor, and the ballroom scene in Act 3 uses big dollops of Prokofiev. The transmission hosts went fishing for superlatives from conductor Koen Kessels, but he was non-committal on the score's quality.

Scarlett doesn't always seem to know what to do with ensemble dances in a narrative context. So we get happy and busy servants leaping about for no obvious reason. Some critics seemed to object to the harlots, but I didn't find them especially problematic since dancing seems like a natural enough activity in a tavern. Much more problematic was the anatomy theater scene, where the creepy professor and his four maidservants came across as a strange riff on Balanchine's Phlegmatic, and which featured a lot of synchronized dancing while holding stacks of books or specimen jars, and where gestures indicating nausea alternated with double pirouettes. But I do think the overly long first act could be fixed with some editing.

Finally, the Creature's character development is sketchy. His appearance after his animation is very brief, and when he reappears in the second act he comes across essentially as a virtuoso dancer, if not for the large stitches on his head. It's also insufficiently clear why he embarks on his murderous rampage against the members of Victor's family. Justine's character is important, but the scenes of her interactions with her extremely stern housekeeper mother don't really fit into the whole.

It was perhaps foolish on the part of the Royal Ballet to film the initial run of the ballet, but I would also be interested in seeing what changes Scarlett makes before San Francisco Ballet performs the ballet. I think it needs some improvement, and there's every reason to think it can be done.

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I recently viewed the May 18 cinemacast of Frankenstein. I agree with most of the print critics, in that this is a terrible waste of the RB's resources. Probably the sorriest excuse for a ballet that I've witnessed, with a thin scenario s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d over a two hour, 40 minute period, counting two intermissions. Other than a Galop and a waltz in the A2 party scene, and another waltz at the start of the A3 wedding ball, the score is devoid of hummable, danceable tunes. Think Henze's dreadfully boring score for Ashton's Ondine...mood music by the measure but few distinct melodies.

I admire much of Scarlett's earlier work but he's absolutely not ready for "prime time" in the full-evening realm. I can see how new (non-ballet-regular) audiences may love this as mimed drama, with some dance thrown in. But this is the Royal BALLET, not the Royal House of Mime. Frankenstein offers little to satisfy the traditional ballet lover.

The costumes were nice but bland, while the decors were fine, if dark, and were overly-reliant on projections. (Nothing beats hand-painted scenery, IMO.) The A1 scene in the anatomy theater was the most visually effective but the movement and stage action during the lesson was downright gross.

The key soloists are obviously among the RB's most talented, making the most of their sad assignments. The children were quite effective. The corps plugged away at their assignments, with the inevitable hookers performing their moves from various Macmillan ballets.

I'm just glad that I did not pay to see this. What a loser of a season for new ballets at the RB! Shall we give the Booby Prize to Carmen, Strapless or Frankenstein? A poll may be created.

ps - Intermissions were inadvertently hilarious, with the hosts trying too hard, showing painful enthusiasm because, heck, that's what they're paid to do! Darcy B's face after the backstage featurettes and, especially, after the end of each of the first two acts spoke volumes, without actually mouthing the words "What the h*** was that?" ROTFL!

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Thanks Natalia, that is an excellent critique.

At Covent Garden the Royal Opera has recently inflicted on us some of the worst productions I've ever seen and with the three ballets you name it looks like the Royal Ballet is joining them in some ludicrous race to the bottom.

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But this is the Royal BALLET, not the Royal House of Mime.

Tangentially -- this made me giggle. There was a clock shop in my hometown called the House of Clocks. They used to have all their clocks set to the same time, so that noon was a cacophony.

Following along with the season through the reviews, it does seem that the company had a series of misses this year. But they're not the only company, and this is not the only season, to have its share of duds. If you browse through any anthology of reviews, you'll find piece after piece dissecting a series of less-than-stellar works. Choreographers seem to make all their mistakes in public -- we all wince when we read the reports, but it's a very exposed kind of learning process.

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I co-sign Mashinka & Natalia's posts. Here's the list of sponsors who funded this: http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/frankenstein-by-liam-scarlett. I'd love to know if they believe they've gotten their money's worth. I can understand the management's wish to give young choreographers their chance at creating full-length ballets. However, the fact remains that there are just some subjects that do not translate well to the ballet stage. The time to figure this out is before mounting a brand new full-length work and underwriting the expenses that go with it.

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Yet, sometimes taking a chance pays off. The Colorado Ballet (to their credit) gave a young Chris Wheeldon a chance in 1997 to create his first full-length ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a great success and it has been shown several times over the decades, most recently in 2014. As I posted at the time, you could see the early glimmerings of a Broadway musical in his production.

http://coloradoballet.org/_blog/balletblog/post/about-the-choreographer-of-midsummer/

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Yet, sometimes taking a chance pays off. The Colorado Ballet (to their credit) gave a young Chris Wheeldon a chance in 1997 to create his first full-length ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. It was a great success and it has been shown several times over the decades, most recently in 2014. As I posted at the time, you could see the early glimmerings of a Broadway musical in his production.

http://coloradoballet.org/_blog/balletblog/post/about-the-choreographer-of-midsummer/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3P4wIuEra4

Thanks for the link! AMND was already a tested subject, as was Mendelssohn's musical score, by the time that Wheeldon tackled it, so it's not quite equal to the RB's Frankenstein experiment. Thinking Petipa, Ashton & Balanchine...not to take away from Wheeldon's success. It looks lovely.
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Others have reported the Royal Ballet had done a Frankenstein Ballet before (by Wayne Eagling) and some aspects of the story are well-known to the public, so a company that has a long and (more or less) successful history of full-length ballets based on literary works may have thought, not entirely irrationally, that it was a good bet. ("Royal House of Mime" indeed :rofl: - mime has always been one of the company's calling cards.)

I haven't seen the production live and the 'literary-adaptation' full-length ballet is not my favorite genre anyway,...I will say that what bothered me about the harlot scene is that it looked like Clerval was all but being sexually assaulted. I found it really unpleasant--and even a little hard to believe that the unpleasantness wasn't deliberate and perhaps intended as a comment on the cheerful 'whoring' of, say, Macmillan's Romeo. I even wondered if Scarlett intended Clerval's resistance to signify his homosexuality (whether repressed or, for social reasons, merely suppressed). But that didn't appear to be something elsewhere explored by the ballet...though perhaps Scarlett's approach to the story as a whole could be suspected of hinting at an unexpressed resistance to the uber-domesticity of the original Frankenstein home.

Possibly not worth the thought, but I actually found it sort of interesting that Scarlett wanted to spend so much time on the Frankenstein home and I wasn't completely convinced that it was simply padding or bad judgment though elements of both may have been involved. I wonder if he will tinker with the ballet for San Francisco.

(If the ballet draws good box office, I suspect the companies and the sponsors can live with bad reviews.)

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International House of Pancakes is just across the street from a hospital that I've been visiting a lot. (Hey, whatever lifts the spirits!) So Royal House of Mime...and I'd probably give the top miming prize to Royal Danish Ballet although the RB-London was well known for it, true.

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There is an IHOP across the street from a local university -- open all night with the "bottomless cup of coffee." It does what needs to be done.

I think it's certainly possible to make a convincing ballet from the Frankenstein story. It doesn't sound like Scarlett managed it here, but the basic idea could work.

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