Wildor Joins Husband Cooper for RFH On Your ToesDate: 7 May 2003
Contact's Sarah Wildor (pictured) will join her husband and former Royal Ballet co-star Adam Cooper in the London mounting of Leicester Haymarket's acclaimed revival of Rodgers and Hart's On Your Toes (See News, 20 Feb 2003). The musical opens at the Royal Festival Hall on 7 August 2003 and continues until 6 September (previews from 4 August).
Wildor's many roles at the Royal Ballet included Juliet, Giselle and Manon. She left the company in September 2001. Her other credits include creating the role of Cinderella in Matthew Bourne's production for Adventures in Motion Pictures, for whom Cooper found international acclaim as the lead swan in AMP’s renowned all-male Swan Lake. This year, Wildor was nominated for a Best Actress in a Musical Olivier her role in Susan Stroman's Contact, which closes this weekend at the West End's Queen's Theatre.
Premiered on Broadway in 1936, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's On Your Toes is a musical comedy set in the ballet world, where a jealous male dancer hires a gangster to indispose the leading man so that he can take his place for the opening night performance. It was last professionally produced in the London in 1984 at the West End's Palace Theatre, starring Natalie Makarova and Tim Flavin. The show features songs such as "There's a Small Hotel" as well as the famous ballet sequence "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".
Wildor plays Vera Baronova to Cooper's Junior Dolan with Irek Mukhamedov (another former principal dancer, with both the Royal Ballet and the Russian Bolshoi Ballet) and Follies' Kathryn Evans reprising their Leicester roles as Konstantine Morrisone and Peggy Porterfield, respectively (though Mukhamedov will not be performing on 11, 12 and 13 August).
Directed by Leicester Haymarket artistic director Paul Kerryson, choreographed by Cooper and designed by Paul Farnsworth, this revival of On Your Toes was first seen in May 2002 in Leicester. It's presented in London by impresario Raymond Gubbay, who last year mounted Kerryson's production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies at the Festival Hall. The new production is Gubbay's sixth collaboration at the South Bank concert venue. It has musical arrangements and direction by Julian Kelly.
- by Terri Paddock
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