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
