Daily Post, Liverpool
A sceptical Philip Key is won over by ice spectacular
SWAN Lake on Ice? You are dealing here with a reviewer who loves his ballet and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake most of all. So I was prepared to tut-tut at this apparently stupid idea of placing the dancers on ice.
In the event, I came away not only impressed but wondering if Swan Lake ought to have been an ice ballet in the fast case. Russian ice dancers under the title The Imperial Ice Stars tackled this work and gave an amazing performance.
Is it possible to dance on stilts, throw a woman across the ice, set the ice itself on fire or skate around with two women attached to your body? The answer in all cases is yes.
This is a show in the best sense, an entertainment in which the ballet itself retains its dignity while skaters prove just what you can do while skating around on a theatre stage. We have people doing somersaults, back flips, grabbing women by one leg and whirling them around or just skating with one leg extended.
While all this is the stuff of exercise, British choreographer Tony Mercer manages to use it to tell the Swan Lake story with his Russian skaters with a proper sense of decorum. He has changed things around a little, including having the principal dancer Odette and her evil counterpart Odile played by two different skaters. The original ballet may have had the same dancers playing both roles but here we get the experience of the Prince dancing with two women at the same time, a routine which works quite beautifully.
One thing with skating as opposed to straight dance is that everything moves very quickly and designer Eamon D'Arcy follows the lead with sets that also change quickly: one minute we are in a ballroom, the next by the lake.
Vadim Yarkov is a superb prince while Olga Sharutenko and Olena Pytash take on the exciting Odette and Odile roles. But it is the ensemble in the end which really excites, the national dances being particularly thrilling in this ice version. Andrei Penkine as the personable Prince's friend Benno and Anton Klykov playing the all action villain Rothbart stand out.
The company got a standing ovation for a show that will electrify both dance and ice fans.