Stage direction: Jenny Miller and Michael Spenceley 

Musical direction from the keyboard: Laurence Panter  with Lucy Mulgan on double bass, and Andrew Sparling on Clarinet.

Rossini’s delicious and charmingly comic Cenerentola, or Cinderella, is a more humanist than magic tale. 

The Prince of the fairytale realm, Ramiro, is seeking a woman “innocent and good”, and orders his court advisor, Alidoro, to disguise himself as a tramp and test out the ladies in Don Magnifico’s house.  Here we find that only Cinderella will help the poor beggar – her sisters and father are far too self centred, conceited and generally on the make to take time for a vagabond. 

It is this same Alidoro who will kit out Cinders in all the finery she needs for the ball, and help her escape before her family detect her.  She leaves behind a bracelet rather than the traditional shoe, and this bracelet will lead to her reunion with her Prince.  Meanwhile, the sisters and father have been further deceived; the Prince and his valet Dandini had swapped places, and they had spent the opera oleaginously making up to a mere servant.

In our version, we update the comedy. Cinderella’s sisters and their status-obsessed dad  trash the earth’s resources, are over-preoccupied with social media influencers,  and generally exhibit callous indifference to their environment. As the two sisters are heavily preoccupied with their roles as influencers on SM,  and their idiotic i phone messages are exposed.