What do San Francisco Ballet and Ballet West have in common? — The Royal Ballet

What do San Francisco Ballet’s Manon and Ballet West’s Cinderella have in common? The answer is they both feature The Royal Ballet’s stage sets and costumes.

San Francisco Ballet performed Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 PG ballet, Manon, from 24th January to 1st February 2025. The programme featured the original sets and costumes made for the Royal Ballet by designer Nicholas Georgiadis. They were loaned from the Royal Ballet in London, the UK.

Artistic Director Tamara Rojo has danced the title role of Manon and she is now bringing many British works from the Royal Ballet, the English National Ballet/Akram Khan and others to San Francisco. She and the company are very good at PR, sharing many movie clips across the social media platforms in a run up to the curtain up of Manon, which was the company premiere.

From the post of the stage sets and costumes, this specific movie clip is insightful and inspiring. The stage sets and costumes have seen many Manon-s over its half-century history.

San Francisco Ballet also shares an excerpt of Manon. And here is the San Francisco Chronicle’s review titled “Misogyny or masterpiece? ‘Manon’ at S.F. Ballet feels all too relevant.” Very personally, I love Manon and MacMillan’s other ballets such as Romeo and Juliet. However, I always find his obsession with rape, as he put it himself, a little cringy.

Ballet West, based in Salt Lake, Utah, purchased the stage sets and costumes of Cinderella from the Royal Ballet. According to Ballet West, they are “never seen in Utah.”

Ballet West performed Cinderella by Sir Frederick Ashton in 2013 and 2018. The company used more than 20-year-old sets and costumes borrowed from the Joffrey Ballet, which had purchased them from the Dutch National Ballet, according to the KSL article.

As Ballet West Artistic Director Adam Sklute was thinking the company needed a new production, he caught up with “his friend, the director of London's Royal Ballet, and learned that the company planned to build a new production and wanted to sell its current costumes and sets that were only 10 years old but were "beautiful pieces of art."”

“Ballet West and Boston Ballet have rented productions from each other before, as the two companies have similar stages. So Sklute approached Boston Ballet, and the two groups — along with some help from Cincinnati Ballet — decided to purchase the "Cinderella" production together as "it just made sense”,” the KSL article says.

The subsequent long labour of love to refit the stage sets with Boston Ballet technicians are described in the article.

Ballet West’s Cinderella by Ashton runs fro 7th to 16th February 2025.

The Royal Ballet performed Cinderella for the Christmas and the New Year programme 2024-2025.

Everyone knows stage sets and costumes are integral parts of ballet and many other theatre arts and so much work is spent on them. It is still nice to shed some light on their histories and backstories.

Also as a 21st century interpretation, it is nice to learn these big sets and extravagant costumes are recycled.

And one more thing. Here is the movie clip of The Royal Ballet production of Manon with Tamara Rojo as the title role and Carlos Acosta as Des Grieux. I myself had a pleasure to watch them perform Manon together many moons ago!

(corrected a typographical error in the headline on 12 April 2025)