Praise from Muso magazine…
Eight-year old Rowan is back to reflect before the last night of Vignette’s Cenerentola at Bury Court.
Backstage magic from designer Will Reynolds and Shawford Mills Production’s recording legend Sebastian Harris
Clorinda (Eliana Pretorian) getting carried away by David Woloszko (Donny M). Last show of this run goes live tomorrow night.
Cenerentola’s sisters - Tisbe and Clorinda - trying to make themselves ugly as they are beautified, and trying to keep warm backstage before tonight’s show.
Heels crunch over gravel, past flaming lanterns that have been lit for the twilight of a very beautiful day. Audience members are drinking in the canopied marquee. They’re dressed down tonight - meaning they’re in suits. This is the English countryside.
Quietly but giantly, parked in the corner of this drinks party, there’s a gleaming Airstream caravan. They peer at it, through its windows into its bright pink and green interior - another world.
And while they’re wondering what this portent might mean for their Rossini, backstage starts to come alive. Chorus boys in dark tan make mingle with girls in rollers eating a hearty stew. Staples is banging a nail into a piece of wood, muttering something about hats, while the dancing girls pace through a few moves behind him. Inevitably, the air is filled with the sound of singers warming up in the toilets.
Soon the cast are on the bright monochrome and red stage, with their show that reaches parts others can’t. We’re all in the world of the Airstream now.
Rosenna East
Thirsty work @VignetteUK - an interval drink for our dancing girls at our Cenerentola show last night. Not your average Rossini chorus, right?
Our pre-show 50s play list
Milo Keep - 50s connoisseur and show cameraman’s selections from the hit parade.
Leading man Nicolas ‘Nico Nico’ Darmanin reaches new heights during a break from a day of stage and orchestras.
Behind the scenes at the ‘get-in’, Rowan Damaschin (eight year-old Granddaughter of the Producers) gives us a glimpse of how the show is coming together….
A daughter rejected.
Past the exquisitely tasteful brickwork and wood beams of the Bury Court barn I drift. Whitewashed plaster and a hint of glass – surroundings as neat as the clipped winter garden outside. The unmistakable sound of a soprano reaches me, as I stumble into what turns out to be a raised orchestra pit – rather like a musicians gallery, at one end of the barn. Well, it used to be a barn. These days it’s an opera stage.
Today I am visiting a stage and piano rehearsal. The chorus boys are on stage doing a choreographed jive to one of their numbers. Yellow pages, fish n chip newspaper and ketchup litter the back of the stage – and I’m confident they’re props. Everybody down there seems to be having a lot of fun.
But suddenly, in the way that opera can get you when you least expect it, I am frozen in my seat. Cenerentola’s father has just declared that his daughter is dead, in front of the Prince, and to her face.
A hush descends across a performance that was a second previously full of laughs. A shiver of goosebumps and grief passes through me. I am aware that everyone in the room has stopped what they are doing to listen. Perched on a bar stool at the edge of the stage, protected only by a corner of the set, our heroine looks as forlorn and lost as any rejected daughter you could image.
Soft blonde hair falls around her shoulders framing painfully sad blue eyes, as even the music itself suspends its relentless activity in its own gasp of empathy and grief.
Rosenna East
