Yes, he's wearing makeup and no, he's not gay.
My good buddy Alex was in Classical Ballet Theatre's Cinderella last night, so we all went to see him perform and be a righteous cheering section. He did a fantastic job; the whole ballet was danced very well. But, being the cultured bunch that we are, we were left with a number of burning questions at the end of the performance:
- What do you call a male ballerina?
- Would it really have hurt them to add some speaking parts?
- Isn't Cinderella's father supposed to be dead at the beginning of the story?
- I don't remember the woodland scene from the cartoon. (Ok, that's not a question, granted, but it was the source of moderate confusion.)
- Why does the prince have to wear tights (and several other more personal questions regarding the prince's undergarments that I don't care to repeat here)? Alex did a very good job of explaining the reasoning behind this one, but not to the satisfaction of some who were sitting in the 2nd row and saw more than they wanted to.
All in all, I learned that you can't take the average 23-year-old boy to the ballet, and that we seem to get all our shared cultural knowledge from Disney cartoons.