Daily Telegraph, Australia
by ALEX LALAK
Death spirals and fairytales are an unusual combination, but in Cinderella On Ice they make for an exhilarating experience. As Cinderella and the Prince, ice-skaters Olga Sharutenko and Andrei Penkine are casual about the difficulty of combining dance and scary sounding skating movements.
"A death spiral is nothing very terrifying to do, and it's actually a very nice movement where the man holds the woman's hands and she spins around him, like she is lying down," says Sharutenko. "It's not the most difficult on ice, it's just the name is bad." Cinderella On Ice is the latest show to come from the Imperial Ice Stars, a Russian-based company.
Both Sharutenko and Penkine are former champion competition skaters, and they relish the challenge of the show. "We feet we are not just skaters, because as soon as you get to the theatre ... you realise you are not just a skater," Sharutenko says. "I can't say we 'play' our parts, because we are not professional actors and we are learning how to do the acting but I promise we really try hard to deliver the character. "As Andrei always says, we try to live on stage. They are emotions you will find in real life and that's what makes it very understandable and readable for the audience."
For Penkine the main difficulty is keeping his emotions under control. "It's not difficult skating in a small space when you've been doing it for approximately seven years, and you do every single movement with the same power but you're doing it with more emotion on your face and more power in your legs," he says. "Usually when you jump, you think about the exit, but one time I did a jump that was absolutely perfect and I forgot where I was and hit a bit of the decorations on the set."
While Penkine is trying to avoid running into the set on this tour, Sharutenko has been attracting a fan club of young girls with fairytale dreams. "In Auckland some of the girls were waiting back after the show and when I come out they were waving to me and saying, 'Cinderella, Cinderella, can we talk to you?'," she says. "It was so amazing to hear and to feet, it was just a great, great thing."