Remember the good old days of the dance boom? The excitement! Margot and Rudi! Misha! Suzanne! Here comes the Royal, here comes the Bolshoi, here comes the Kirov. The must-see hits: Dances at a Gathering, Jewels, Push Comes to Shove. The galas! And let’s not forget Glamorama Martha! This was not just dance, it was Read More
“You gotta get a gimmick,” Stephen Sondheim instructed us in Gypsy, and the guys behind Kings of the Dance were listening. (They include the producer, Sergei Danilian; the “Artistic Associates,” Angel Corella and Ethan Stiefel; and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, to which Stiefel is connected and where the Kings premiered a week Read More
“You gotta get a gimmick,” Stephen Sondheim instructed us in Gypsy, and the guys behind Kings of the Dance were listening. (They include the producer, Sergei Danilian; the “Artistic Associates,” Angel Corella and Ethan Stiefel; and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, to which Stiefel is connected and where the Kings premiered a week before Read More
At the very last possible moment, after the endless parade of non-events, silly events and disastrous events perpetrated by City Ballet to mark the George Balanchine centenary, there was finally a real event-three performances by the imported Georgian State Dance Company. Yes, Georgia was the place of Balanchine’s origins (although he didn’t set foot there Read More
The American Ballet Theatre spring season ended in a flock of Swan Lakes -11 of them. That’s what the Met audience seems to want: name classics, the more the merrier. And, of course, anything with the word “swan” is an automatic audience grabber: Swan Lake , The Dying Swan -when do we get Swann’s Way Read More
Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect-they’re all empty. We’ve had more than enough proof of that these past weeks as American Ballet Theatre and Read More
For two weeks this season, ballet came back to life in New York as something you could love without hesitation or reservation. American Ballet Theatre, after floundering so long in search of plausible repertory, found it where they should have been looking all this time-in Frederick Ashton. By staging so beautifully two of his greatest Read More
