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| John Leech Marley's Ghost Source Wikimedia Commons |
Northern Ballet A Christmas Carol Leeds Grand Theatre, 31 Dec 2024
Although I read in Dance and Dancers about a performance at the Royal Northern College of Music by a new company called Northern Dance Theatre when I was an undergraduate at St. Andrews, it was only in 1987 that I saw them for the first time. I could not have had a better introduction because it was Gillian Lynne's A Simple Man with Christopher Gable as L S Lowry and Moira Shearer as the artist's mother.
They were two ballet heroes from my childhood. Shearer had retired before I took an interest in ballet though clips and photos of her remained long afterwards. Gable, on the other hand, was one of the biggest stars in the 1960s when I started to attend the ballet. I saw him several times and admired him greatly.
At about the same time as I saw A Simple Man or perhaps shortly afterwards Gable was appointed Artistic Director of the company now known as Northern Ballet. As I said in my review of Moriconi and Gable's Romeo and Juliet on 5 April 2024, "[s]ome of my favourite works were created while Gable was the Artistic Director of the company and I have always regarded that time as a golden age." I added that it gave me great pleasure to see Romeo and Juliet again and that I very much looked forward to seeing A Christmas Carol again in November.
I actually saw it on the last day of the year and I was not disappointed. We had an excellent cast:
- Jonathan Hanks was Scrooge
- Joseph Taylor was Young Scrooge
- Dominique Larose was Belle
- Harris Beattie was Bob Cratchit
- Jun Ishii was Scrooge's nephew
- Sarah Chun was the nephew's wife
- Bruno Serraclara was Mr Fezziwig, and
- Amber Lewis was Mrs Dezziwig,
