E-Mail This Article to a Friend Shoe story Boston Ballet’s Cinderella BY DEBRA CASH

When you come right down to it, Cinderella is a fairy tale about shoes. Girl gets shoes, girl loses shoe, guy finds shoe, guy searches high and low for the girl who can wear the shoe, and who, if he needs confirmation, has the matching one stashed away in her apron pocket.

Shoes set the direction of the choreography in Boston Ballet’s new Cinderella, opening October 13 for a 10-day run at the Wang Theatre. In her first scenes, Cinderella dances barefoot — which, as ballerina Larissa Ponomarenko explained at a recent Boston University lecture demonstration, means she has to develop protective calluses in time for opening night. Her fairy godmother provides the famous glass slippers (in actuality, a pair of satin pointe shoes). After she loses one of them trying to make her curfew, she spends most of the rest of the ballet in a lopsided state, one shoe on and one shoe off, the pointe shoe that would betray her secret covered with a sock. For his part, the Prince spends most of Act III meeting women who wear wooden shoes, riding boots, and ice skates. No go.

Boston Ballet mounts productions of Cinderella every few years, set to the ravishing Sergei Prokofiev score. Early in his tenure as Boston Ballet artistic director, Mikko Nissinen was reported to be considering reviving British choreographer Michael Corder’s fluent and open-hearted Cinderella, first presented by Boston Ballet in 1997. But then Canadian choreographer James Kudelka, who hadn’t worked with Boston Ballet since the company performed his abstract Alliances in 1989, had a big hit at the National Ballet of Canada with his Art Deco–inspired Cinderella. Kudelka’s opulent production is highlighted by David Boechler’s set and costumes, based on Erté designs from the 1920s: a glamorous silver-and-"ermine" opera coat for Cinderella’s arrival at the palace, and over-the-top frocks for the stepsisters, which, according to company costume manager Charles Heightchew, indicate that the girls come from a family "with more money than taste."

Boston Ballet executive director Valerie Wilder has known Kudelka since they were kids together at the National Ballet School in Toronto, and licensing the production was a natural fit between two organizations that rely on story ballets for their bread and butter. During the past two months, Kudelka and his assistants have been visiting in rotating shifts to teach the work to the company and to supervise the production. The show is triple-cast, with Ponomarenko dancing with Roman Rykine as the Prince, Lorna Feijóo as Cinderella paired with Carlos Molina (familiar with the Prince’s role from a stint substituting for an injured dancer in Toronto), and newly promoted principal Romi Beppu dancing with Nelson Madrigal.

Boston Ballet hopes Kudelka’s Cinderella will appeal equally to audiences whose frame of reference is the Disney animated film and to those familiar with the great Frederick Ashton production that was a vehicle for Margot Fonteyn and which featured two stepsisters in hilarious drag. Kudelka’s take on Cinderella is at its heart a meditation on artificiality and authenticity. The choreographer has been quoted as saying that his ballet is no Pretty Woman, with a rich man transforming a poor girl through money and power. Instead, Cinderella rescues her prince from a life of chic superficiality. For their happily ever after, the Prince and Cinderella abandon the glitz of palace life for a more modest alternative, in the domestic paradise of Cinderella’s vegetable garden.

CINDERELLA | Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont St, Boston | October 13-23 | 800.447.7400