There was plenty of eye candy at the School of American Ballet’s annual Winter Ball, held last week in the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. Jaw-dropping dames lounged beside palm trees, plucking instruments’ strings. Models posed for the shutterbugs, blinged out in Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry. But the Transom had eyes for Read More
The Sleeping Beauty is the greatest, most challenging and most vulnerable of classical ballets. Everything can go wrong with it, and all too often, everything does. Most of us have an ideal Beauty in mind; for my generation, it’s the famous Sadler’s Wells version that we first saw in New York in 1949 and that Read More
Peter Martins’ Swan Lake does its job—it gets people into the theater ( all Swan Lakes get people into the theater), and then it gets them out of the theater in only two and a half hours. In other words, it’s efficient, and if efficiency is what you look for in ballet, this is the Read More
Why did the just-ended spring seasons of American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet seem like marathons to be endured, not opportunities to be enjoyed? The inescapable answer is that they’re both in trouble. Twenty years ago, even 10 years ago, each company had its own brand of problem: A.B.T. had an exhausted repertory, Read More
