Review: Giselle, Royal Ballet

Yesterday afternoon’s performance took a while to get going. It may have been the last minute casting changes; perhaps the talking and coughing from the matinee audience, or it may have just been that I didn’t feel too good. At least I ought some cough sweets on the way there. I saw the matinee starring Laura Morera as Giselle and Federico Bonelli as Albrecht. He was substituting for Nehimiah Kish due to injury. They are both excellent dancers but perhaps had not had sufficient practice together to generate the magic to make the love scenes as convincing as they should be. Going. It was the arrival of another substitute, Hikaru Kobayashi in the Pas De Six that marked the moment it really got going for me and Morera and Bonelli then found that magic in the ghostly second act. Generally, this was a good production of Petipa’s classic but the cast sheet tells me it was their 560th performance and I couldn’t help feeling they are all getting a bit tired.

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