Matthew Bourne to stage The Red Shoes

New Adventures have announced the world premiere of Matthew Bourne’s production of The Red Shoes.

The show  will open at the Theatre Royal Plymouth on 21st November 2016 with an eight week Christmas season at Sadler’s Wells from 6th December 2016 to 29th January 2017. The show will tour until April 2017. 

A beloved fairy-tale and Academy Award-winning movie, The Red Shs has seduced audiences and inspired generations of dancers with its tale of obsession, possession and one girl’s dream to be the greatest dancer in the world. Victoria Page lives to dance but her ambitions become a battleground between the two men who inspire her passion.

Creating the coveted role of Victoria Page will be the Australian dancer and New Adventures Principal, Ashley Shaw. Ashley is currently wowing audiences around the UK and receiving rave reviews for her performance as Aurora in Matthew Bourne’s “Sleeping Beauty”. She has been dancing with New Adventures since 2009 performing many of the Company’s leading female roles including “Nutcracker!”, ‘Lana’ in “The Car Man”, ‘Kim’ in “Edward Scissorhands” and the title role in “Cinderella”. This will be her first created role in a new production.

Bourne said today: “It has been a long held ambition of mine to bring “The Red Shoes” to the stage as a dance/drama. It is set in the theatrical world of a touring dance company. It is actually about dance and dancers, a world that we all understand so well. However, the film’s genius is to make that theatrical world at times surreal, larger than life and highly cinematic. 

"My challenge will be to capture some of that surreal, sensuous quality within the more natural theatre setting. It has also long been an ambition of mine to bring the incomparable music of Bernard Herrmann to the stage. It has been fascinating to discover how much of this music lends itself to story-telling through dance and this production will, I believe, be the first full length ballet to celebrate his unique music.”

Bourne’s magical new adaptation of the legendary Powell and Pressburger film reunites him with his regular collaborators and New Adventures Associate Artists and the team that staged “Sleeping Beauty”; Lez Brotherston (set and costumes), Paule Constable (lighting) and Paul Groothuis (sound).

This World Premiere is set to a new score arranged by New Adventures Associate Artist, Terry Davies using the mesmerizing music of golden-age Hollywood composer, Bernard Herrmann (most famous for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese), whose work ranges from the witty and playfully robust to the achingly romantic and bittersweet.