Beauty and the Beast on Ice
April 15, 2008
Venue: Theatre Royal, Newcastle
Date Reviewed: 15th April 2008
Last years touring production of Peter Pan on Ice by the Russian Ice Stars was amazing and I eagerly looked forward to this tour of Beauty and the Beast.
Unfortunately while the skating is still of a very high standard and it is incredible how fast the skaters can travel on such a small stage, the production itself lacks warmth.
The story of Beauty and the Beast is well known and the young girls dressed in the Belle costumes must have been disappointed to find the story was very different to the one used by Disney in their stage, screen and ice shows.
In this Vee Deplidge presentation Beauty has two sisters and a brother and their father loses all his money before he ends up lost in the forest and encounters the Beast.
There is no doubting Andrey Chuvilyev is an ideal Beast, as his stature is almost seven feet, but he is badly let down by a costume that neither makes him look like a beast or is frightening in anyway.
A voice-over before each scene tells us what is happening, from the initial scenes with an old woman coming to the palace and placing a curse over the Prince. The curse means the Prince will turn in to a Beast until he finds true love. At the back of the stage there is a large book of Beauty and the Beast and the pages turn to form the background for all the scenes.
As the story unfolds we witness first class skating and acrobatics but the story fails to grab your attention. The transformation scene, despite being listed as a special effect, is carried out in a thick cloud of dry ice with the Prince skating out of the mist once the Beast can no longer be seen, so there are no clever illusions to wonder about on the way home.
It is only when Beauty (Olga Pershankova) and the Prince (Valdis Mintals) skate together that there appears to be any passion in any of the characters and unfortunately that is all too brief.
As a follow-on show to the fantastic Peter Pan, I was disappointed in this production. I only hope that next year’s production of Cirque de Glace lives up to its marketing of “an Ice Show Beyond Your Imagination” as the Russian Ice Stars are far better than their current production, which while entertaining could have been so much more.
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