By Robert Gottlieb 6/12/12 6:26pm

Dance

Diana Vishneva and Marcelo Gomes in "Onegin." (Courtesy ABT)

Dream On: At City Ballet, Shakespeare’s a Dependable Delight

ABT has completed the first half of its spring season at the Met. We’ve had the Giselles (and their sister Wilis), Bayadére’s Nikiyas (and their sister Shades). We’ve been lucky enough to have the population of the Bright Stream collective farm and the visiting artists who come to cheer them up—though they’re pretty cheerful already. And we’ve had a brand new production of John Cranko’s Onegin. Did we need it? Did we need Onegin at all? No, but ABT needed it. How can the company fill the huge Met without the full-evening costume dramas that keep the tourists coming? Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 4:50pm

Dance

Balanchine's "Liebeslieder Walzer." (Courtesy Paul Kolnik/City Ballet)

The Fashions and Passions of City Ballet: From the Sublime to the Inconsequential

New York City Ballet’s spring gala came and went, as galas will do, and left behind two unnecessary new ballets plus new costumes for Symphony in C, that Balanchine masterpiece to Bizet, that has been absent from the repertory for four years or so, God knows why. It’s true that the Karinska costumes, which some of us have been looking at lovingly for a lifetime, had come to seem a little dowdy; why not freshen them up? The job has been done by Marc Heppel, the company’s director of costumes, and though the result is a touch heavy—trying just a little too hard for a fashion look, with a sprinkling of tiny crystals (a nod to the ballet’s original title, Le Palais de Cristal) and an over-determined cleavage—they’ll serve. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 1/31/12 6:01pm

Review

Tyler Angle, Maria Kowroski, Amar Ramasar, Sara Mearns, Robert Fairchild, Wendy Whelan and Daniel Ulbricht in "Les Carillons."

Wheeldon by Three: A Triple Bill Brings out the Best in City Ballet’s Ballerinas

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it’s stuck with them for a while—they have to earn their keep. Likewise, when it spends a lot of money on an arid version of a classic, it too has to serve again and again. In its current season, City Ballet is reaping what it sowed: Yet another go round for Peter Martins’s arid, antiromantic Romeo and Juliet, and exhumations of the awful Lynn Taylor-Corbett Seven Deadly Sins (gimmick: Patti LuPone singing—badly—the Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya songs) and the awful Peter Martin Ocean’s Kingdom (gimmick: music by Paul McCartney). I can’t imagine any knowledgeable ballet-lover wanting to see any of these more than once. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 10/11/11 6:00pm

ballet

Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette in "Rubies" from Jewels. (Photo: Paul Kolnik)

City Ballet’s September Start

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet’s ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. It’s unfortunate that this became possible only when the financially floundering City Opera was forced to decamp from the David H. Koch Theater. (To be fair, this is one thing we can’t blame on David H. Koch and his politics.) But at least the opera’s loss is dance’s gain. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 5/24/11 9:55pm

Dance

Sinners and Saints At City Ballet

City Ballet is having a schizophrenic season. The opening black-and-white Balanchine week was a triumph, and the further rush of Balanchine in the following weeks has given us the most satisfying programming in many years. Equally, the overall level of performance compared to what we’ve been experiencing for 20 years has been dazzling: not only Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 2/02/11 12:10am

ballet

City Ballet Shows What It’s Made Of in Two Uneven Programs

The all-Balanchine opening night at City Ballet this season was a discouraging affair. To begin with, it was ridiculously short–less than an hour and three-quarters. And then it was ridiculously slight. And ridiculously programmed. A satisfactory ballet program is more than four ballets flung serially onto the stage.

Walpurgisnacht Ballet is one of Balanchine’s lesser Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 10/12/10 11:25pm

Another Fall for Dance

So it’s come and gone again–our wildly popular (all 27,500 City Center seats sold out in three days) annual smorgasbord known as “Fall for Dance.” Five programs, 10 performances, 20 works and a gaggle of drained dance critics, at least those of us nut cases who turn up for everything. As usual, it’s been a Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 7/07/10 2:15am

At the Close of the Season

Again and again we’ve been told that the retirement of Darci Kistler from City Ballet-after a career of 30 years-was the end of an era: the era of ballerinas anointed by Balanchine. When she was 16, he brought her into the company, and within months she was dancing the Swan Queen, the Sugarplum Read More