Last Updated on October 2, 2025
Like Water for Chocolate Opens The Royal Ballet’s New Season
Like Water for Chocolate, which kicks off The Royal Ballet’s 2025/26 season, is choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s third full-length work for the company, where he is Artistic Associate. The previous two, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2011) and The Winter’s Tale (2014), are complex, eye-filling spectacles, Alice in particular, full of ahhh-inducing visual trickery; but Like Water for Chocolate takes atmospheric stagecraft to an altogether different level.
Based on the eponymous novel by the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel (you may have watched the hugely successful 1992 film adaptation), Like Water for Chocolate is a sprawling family saga, set in 1920s Mexico and centred on the thwarted love between Tita and Pedro. A host of fantastic characters populates it, the convoluted plot strung together by a series of cookery recipes, the whole liberally infused with magic realism. Do read the full synopsis beforehand!
And like the book and the film, so the ballet transports the audience to a world that is a unique blend of real locus with its own evocative imagery – Mexico – and magical fiction through a near perfect combination of choreography, musical score, design, lighting and, of course, glorious dancing. For the best part of three hours, you are immersed in a colourful, sun-bathed, viscerally different universe.
The title Like Water for Chocolate refers to the near-boiling point of water needed to make the perfect drinking chocolate in Mexico; when applied to people, it denotes intense passion and sexual desire on the verge of boiling over.
So it is with Tita and Pedro. As the youngest daughter, Tita is not allowed to marry so she can look after her mother in her old age. The daunting Mama Elena determines that Pedro should instead marry her eldest daughter, Rosaura. That he does in order to remain close to Tita.
Subsidiary characters include Nacha, the old cook who raised Tita and taught her the mysteries of good cooking, Dr Brown, who cures lovelorn Tita of a mysterious, life-threatening illness and nearly marries her, but Tita’s love for Pedro won’t let her go through with the wedding.
And then there’s Tita’s sister Gertrudis, who, under the influence of a particular dish created by Tita, becomes possessed by unquenchable erotic heat and goes off with the revolutionary leader Juan Alejandrez, with whom she has a steamy sex scene atop a stallion in one of the most exuberant scenes of a ballet never short of exuberance.
Creating the visual components for such an ambitious, atmospheric work posed tremendous demands on regular Wheeldon collaborator, the designer Bob Crowley and his team. Associate set designer Jaimie Todd let me in on some of the tricks of the trade that enabled them to create scenes such as that sex duet atop a horse:
“Bob wanted a real horse, but we were told it wasn’t possible for various reasons, so we wanted an idea of a horse, but not too much of a horse, because you want to be concentrating on the dancers, not the horse. So, we tried to pare it back and just have this trolley with a head and a tail and a saddle; and then we did a bit of puppeteering to explain to the dancers how to operate the horse, because they already have so much dancing to remember.”
To me, though, the most memorable image in the ballet is the finale (Spoiler Alert!), when Tita and Pedro are finally free to be together. The overwhelming intensity of their repressed love boils over, and surrounded by spontaneous flames, they slowly leave their bed to rise up and away.e
This generates one of the most breathtaking coups de théâtre I have ever seen; so I was staggered to learn from Jaimie Todd that the scene nearly didn’t make the final cut:
“It was difficult flying people, and Chris had to hold his nerve. It’s a tricky thing because we have to get so many people together to make sure the safety is OK, to make sure the dancers are happy, to make sure the timing is right… but that’s one of the most beautiful moments of the ballet, and it does show that Chris and Bob have worked together before, because there is a shortcut in their language to explain things.”
The musical score for Like Water for Chocolate is by another regular Christopher Wheeldon collaborator, Joby Talbot, who composed the scores for both Alice and The Winter’s Tale.
Talbot’s scores are known for their danceability and Like Water for Chocolate draws inspiration from traditional Mexican music to create a score that’s as evocative as it is original and above all, he told me, seeks to avoid cliches.
“Mexican music has been pastiched to the nth degree by Hollywood since day one. My way came from listening to pre-Hispanic indigenous music in Mexico, so the extraordinary percussion instruments, and the flute that those pre-Columbian, mezzo-American cultures had.”
The score includes traditional Latin and Mexican dance forms, including a “danzon”, and for the arrival of the revolutionary soldiers “a very fast dance based on the Venezuelan joropo [similar to the fandango].”
The first reprise of Like Water for Chocolate since its 2022 premiere will bring back the original cast, as well as interesting debuts. Francesca Hayward and Marcelino Sambé return in the roles of Tita and Pedro, which they originated; Anna Rose O’Sullivan will alternate in the roles of Gertrudis, which she made very much her own with a rip-roaring performance in the first run, and her debut as Tita. Mayara Magri, a bit underwritten as the original Rosaura, will also get a turn at Tita, as will the promising First Artist Ella Newton Severgnini.
Elsewhere, there will be debuts as Pedro for principal Joseph Sissens and soloist Francisco Serrano. Calvin Richardson debuts as Dr Brown, a role created by Matthew Ball.
All images © RBO 2022 Tristram Kenton
Like Water for Chocolate is in repertoire at RBO 1 – 24 October 2025
Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London WC2E 9DD
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