The unlikely double bill of rapper/actress (or raptress) Queen Latifah and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman will appear as guest artists at The New York City Ballet’s Spring Gala celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the American Musical Festival. Ms. Latifah will perform George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” with the New York City Ballet Orchestra, and Mr. Read More
“Sarah Jessica invited me,” said television personality Amy Sedaris. “I’ve never even been to the ballet!” The actress, who played Sarah Jessica Parker’s publisher on Sex and the City, was standing alone in the midst of a crowded cocktail party before the New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala at Lincoln Center last Thursday. Ms. Parker, Read More
Another New York cultural institution begins its season tonight: the New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala honors the designer Valentino Garavani (we don’t hear that surname often!). The designer has crafted costumes for three ballet performances tonight, including one world premiere. Turning up to support the ballet, Valentino, or simply their own right to have Read More
“Honestly, there is nothing like it,” Dianna DiMenna told The Observer Monday evening. “The beauty, the discipline, the lineage, the heritage, the history!” she gushed. While Ms. DiMenna’s lavish words may have applied to a great many ventures beloved by the city’s gentility, she was in fact referring to ballet. As the evening’s prima, she greeted guests in the marbled lobby of the David H. Koch Theater with that particular hostess’s élan, kissing elegant consoeurs and their bow-tied husbands. The decorous crowd had gathered for the School of American Ballet’s Winter Ball, and there was surely no shortage of pomp or circumstance. Read More
New York City Ballet married Broadway and Balanchine at their annual Spring Gala, which featured the premiere of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, a collaboration between the ballet’s company and the Tony Award-winning singer Patti LuPone. The veteran Broadway actor Victor Garber (best known for his role in Titanic and soon Read More
Okay, dance people, buckle up–March is going to be a bumpy month. It’s a modern-dance invasion. (Paul Taylor’s come and gone; everyone else is on his/her way.) Start figuring out your priorities now … next week will be too late.
To begin with: You’re going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce. Read More
Premieres, revivals, debuts … With our two major ballet companies both in residence at Lincoln Center (as they are every May and June), the last few weeks have been a revolving door of sensational triumphs, disappointments and fiascoes.
Let’s get the worst over first. Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime Read More
“Bugsy Siegel. As soon as I thought of it, I knew that was my story,” Melissa Barak said. She was speaking of her newest, yet-to-be-titled City Ballet commission-which will premiere in the company’s spring season, on June 5. Though Ms. Barak left the New York City ballet in 2007 to join the newly formed Los Read More
Several months ago, I received a letter from a New Jersey couple who were distressed over the schedule for City Ballet’s current season. (“I reviewed it with disbelief and shock.”) Out of the 56 upcoming performances, they specify, 37 are of five full-evening ballets. “What’s going on? Why this concentration on such a narrow range, Read More
The City Opera has ceded shared theater space to the City Ballet for an increased portion of the fall season, The Times reported yesterday. The four weeks in September and October will allow the ballet to stage its first fall repertory season in 45 years. Meanwhile,f giving up time in the Read More
