CINDERELLA La Cenerentola

Cruel sisters. Kind heroine. Bell-bottoms. You know the story. Stepsisters, a missing shoe, a happy ending. Rossini wrote the whole thing — music, orchestration, the lot — in three weeks in 1817, when he was twenty-five years old. But Rossini’s Cinderella is its own creature: no fairy godmother, no pumpkin. The magic is the heroine’s stubborn belief that kindness costs nothing and changes everything. Stuart Maunder sets it in 1970s Adelaide. Wal...