Cinderella on Ice

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see Cinderella on Ice. It's my sister's fault - she decided she wanted to see more shows this year, and since her husband isn't keen, I get to go with her.

Cinderella on Ice was performed by the Imperial Ice Stars, who are basically a bunch of mostly Russian ex Olympic and World Champion ice dancers or figure skaters. I happen to love watching ice dancing and skating, so despite some people seeming to think anything on ice is crap, I was really looking forward to it.

And it indeed was awesome. The costumes were great, the music was good and the skating was incredible. It really was amazing to see them doing such great lifts and turns on such a small stage, only a fraction of the size of a normal skating rink.

There were a few issues though. The handsome prince was _extremely _gay. He straightened up for a while during the middle of the performance, then gayed up again towards the end. There was also gay couple at the ball , which was quite cute. It probably didn't help that we'd seen a clip on TV about it the night before in which they interviewed the male lead skater.

Breathless interviewer: You must really like skating with all these beautiful women? Handsome Prince skater: I like skating.

Another interesting aspect was that we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out the story. We were too cheap to fork out $20 for a programme, but we figured we wouldn't need it anyway. I remember the Cinderella story, and my sister reads the story about 20 times a day (she's an early childhood teacher) so we thought we'd be OK. But neither of us remembered the bit where Cinderella is dancing in Swan Lake and takes over the lead role when the lead ballerina cannot dance. Nor did we remember the gypsy man and woman who appear throughout the performance in lieu of the fairy godmother. We were also quite unclear about some guy who appeared to be Cinderella's father, but must have been a bit of an asshole to let his new wife treat his daughter the way she did. Still, we could figure out the gist of it.

The other funny part was the clearly only a small section of the audience had any clue about skating. They gasped and clapped at what looked (to most of us) fairly ordinary lifts or poses. Whereas the rest of us were blown away by fast spins that are probably technically very easy.

In summary, I enjoyed it very much, and am looking forward to the next 'on ice' event I can attend.

If you want a little peek at what we saw, here's some YouTube: