Queen Latifah.

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. Stoltzman will do the Interlude from Andre Previn’s “Sonata for Clarinet and Piano.” There will, of course, be ballet by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, and CFDA Award-winning designer Joseph Altuzarra designed costumes for one of the dances, so expect all the society grande dames to be in Altuzarra, bien sur.

The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, 20 Lincoln Center, (212) 870-5570, cocktails 5:30pm, performance 7pm, supper ball 9pm.

Sarah Jessica Parker (Patrick McMullan)

“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, one of the evening’s co-chairs and a friend of the guest of honor, tan and glam designer Valentino Garavani, had yet to walk the red carpet.

“I love the sets, though,” said the ballet neophyte, in a tea-length dress as starchy as a tutu. “But he just told me”—she gestured at a nearby party guest—“that the stage is very bare tonight!”

Ms. Sedaris had slightly more knowledge about the evening’s program than did broadcasting icon Barbara Walters. We asked her what her favorite ballet was. “Tell me what the ballet is tonight,” she told us gamely, “and I’ll tell you it’s my favorite!”

We inquired about the just-announced joint interview with Barack and Michelle Obama on The View the following week. Would Ms. Walters go hard or soft on the president and first lady? “Both hard and soft!” she told us. “We’ve been writing questions all day!

“You know, there are five women asking questions, and two interview subjects—both of them,” she continued, before the conversation was interrupted by a magenta-clad, jewel-bedecked interloper. “The bar would not serve me!” she shouted. It was Princess Firyal of Jordan.

“This is a reporter,” said Ms. Walters.

“So write that!” the princess cried. “Write that they are closed, that they would not even serve me two sips of water!”

We promised we would denote the bar’s closure at the very moment we glimpsed Iman snapping pictures with well-wishers. “Let’s do a prom photo!,” said a male friend of hers. We caught her as she entered the crush of people in the entryway to the bar area. “Follow me,” she exhorted, leading us to the quieter balcony, which overlooked a slew of people rushing through the lobby to claim their seats. Who were we to argue? We asked about her relationship with Valentino, the designer who’d crafted the costumes for the evening’s ballet. “He’s a great host. He makes sure a huge party feels like an intimate gathering. He has staff that helps him—but it feels as though he’s doing it all himself! There are people doing it, but he’s very involved.”

Anjelica Huston paused in her conversation with Ron Rifkin (who’d played one of Carrie Bradshaw’s Vogue editors, and who we later saw embracing Ms. Parker—she knows how to gather a posse!) to speak to us about Valentino, for whom she’d worked as a model in the 1980s. She was not wearing Valentino this evening. “The dresses were a bit small for me!” she explained. “These days, he’s designing for small Italian women.”

We’d gotten caught up chatting and had little time to tarry before the ballet began: rushing up the stairs to the first circle, we realized we were behind a group of men gathered around Ms. Parker herself (husband Matthew Broderick was absent, likely performing in his Broadway show, Nice Work If You Can Get It). The group moved as one—to a closed bar station so that Ms. Parker could grab a napkin to spit out her gum—then headed to the center of the first circle, where, all in a row, Iman, Valentino, Ms. Huston and Ms. Parker formed one very glamorous cheering circle. The ballet was preceded by a video in which celebrity friends who couldn’t be present testified to Valentino’s genius. Hugh Jackman, in a maroon henley, talked about how Valentino criticized his wardrobe; Meryl Streep read his name in an exaggerated Italian accent; and Rita Wilson commented on his impressive tan.

At intermission, we joined the crowd swarming outside—including Anne Hathaway, in near-transparent embroidered green Valentino. She recalled for us a Valentino party of past vintage—she’d been one of the attendees at his 40th anniversary celebration in Rome. “It was a very good party, with aerial ballet dancers,” the Les Miserables actress told us crisply. She’d first met the designer on the set of The Devil Wears Prada, at which time, we posited, she must have been relatively green.

“Quite,” she replied, turning away.

The curtain rose upon the magical second act, the world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Bal de Couture, with elaborate black-and-white tulle gowns with hidden fuchsia lining. Valentino himself came out after the ballerinas’ bows to adjust a tutu’d black swan’s crown and announce, “The most important thing is that all of you came to see my clothes—but what is very important is being a part of the New York City Ballet.”

Immediately afterward, as patrons noshed on a dinner of lobster and salmon—and Valentino circled past our table declaring “Oh, I’m so happy!”—Ms. Parker addressed a small circle of reporters (she’d left her matching cape at her dinner seat, next to Bravo executive Andy Cohen, in order to accept thanks for hosting the event and circulate). Asked whether she wished to wear the Valentino ballet costumes she’d seen onstage that evening, she noted, “We all spend a lifetime looking at things we can’t have—that’s the beauty of having eyes. That’s why there’s museums, theater, music!” She said Valentino had first invited her to dinner five or six years ago, and that he was, indeed, a wonderful host.

Valentino

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 a good time are event co-chair Sarah Jessica Parker, Barry and Diane (once again!), Carolina Herrera, and Linda Evangelista. Perhaps the most unexpected guest? Andy Cohen, who’s supposed to be hosting his live Bravo talk show at eleven sharp—hurry home to the studio, Andy, before your limo turns back into a pumpkin!

Lincoln Center, cocktails at 5:30pm, performance at 7pm, supper ball at 9pm, tickets and information can be found at nycballet.com.

Diana DiMenna at the School of American Ballet's Winter Ball

“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.
The evening was, rather circuitously, inspired by a collection of jewelry designed by Van Cleef and Arpels intended to evoke St. Petersburg’s legendary Le Bal du Palais d’Hiver, a glistening jewel on the diadem of grand 20th-century fetes. Upon entering the lobby, guests were met with a blinding ivory tableau vivant. Models—clad in alabaster gowns, fur and suits—lounged upon a nest of regal divans and cotton snowfall while donning the jewels. Few guests, however, seemed to notice the scene as they greeted their friends, cocktail panache flowing freely as Champagne.

Without hesitation, Ms. DiMenna named Georges Balanchine’s Jewels as her favorite ballet. “It was one of the first ballets that I saw as a student of the art. I was able to appreciate it for it’s beauty and splendor, but I was also able to see the incredible mastery of the dancers,” she said. “Of course the irony of that, which I just realized, was that Georges Balanchine created that, the ballet, based on a collection by Van Cleef and Arpels! I didn’t even remember that until I said it,” she claimed, her dangling diamond earrings swinging freely as she laughed. Ironic or no, we respected her effortless doyenne artistry.

Ms. DiMenna’s cohosts, Julia Koch and Betsy Pitts, roved the room, chattering with friends. “I’m doing my Russian look,” Ms. Koch told a friend, showing off her ornate fur-collared gown. Her hair, an up-done knot doubtless crafted at an uptown salon, was pulled tight, articulating each facial muscle as she laughed. “I feel like I’m in Downton Abbey!”

The true matriarch of the evening, however, was Coco Kopelman, who had created the Winter Ball event eight years prior. She explained that over time the soirée had evolved and had become a purely social function. “It used to be a corporate evening. We used to honor someone from the business side and the arts, but after a while we thought it was getting to be like many dinners,” she said, stopping as she was approached by a friend. “Félicitations! Ça va?” she inquired dutifully before returning her attention to The Observer. “We all go to many dinners. We all applaud the person who is the honoree. But in the end, people want to see friends, have fun and celebrate the kids,” she said.

Young Patron chairman Chelsea Clinton soon appeared, husband Marc Mezvinsky steadily, stonily at her side. Having practiced ballet for 15 years in her curly-haired youth, Ms. Clinton felt indebted to the art. “I’m deeply grateful to ballet for having given me an aesthetic education,” she said, with well-learned (or inherited) diplomacy. Would she dance again, we wondered? “I hope there are many opportunities for me to support ballet or students or choreographers,” she responded.

While the diamonds twinkled throughout the room, blushingly refracted in flutes of rosé, Prince Dmitri of Yugoslavia said nothing could compare to the opulence of Le Bal in St. Petersburg. “You know, that was a legendary ball with all the fantastic jewelry in the world. Nothing ever existed in terms of jewelry after the end of the Russian empire,” he declared. “Because in one night, every woman would wear the equivalent of today’s hundred million dollars of jewelry. In those days they wore five necklaces, and it didn’t look gaudy. Today you can’t,” he lamented, before ascending the marble staircase toward dinner.

Upstairs, lavish tables had been set. Accustomed to circular tables flush with faux familiarity, we were pleased to see Vieux Monde long tables. Centerpieces were composed of rose bouquets and sugar-coated fruit, accented with massive candles flickering in their towering gilded holders. The table made even the gala-circuit contingent take pause. Over the course of the next hour, Piter-inspired cuisine from gravlax to stroganoff was served along with abundant pinots, grigio and noir.

As dinner was coming to an end the younger patrons appeared, Champagne flutes in hand, on the theater’s upper tiers overlooking the opulent spread. Boisterous in their ball gowns and tuxedoes, the youthful throng was hushed as the school’s executive director made brief remarks.

A group of students from the school performed a pièce d’occasion, inspired, it seemed, by either a Russian tavern or house of ill repute. Complete with choreographed arm wrestling, staggering and spread-eagle lifts, the dance may very well have scandalized tsars and tsarinas at Le Bal a century ago but was welcomed with warm applause by the postmillennial audience. After the Russian music stopped, a thudding electronic beat hit the speakers, and the young dancers ran into the crowd, strategically grabbing the evening’s most notable attendees.

Immediately, David Koch was summoned by two dancers and graciously began to dance. Before long, however, Mr. Koch was toe-tapping with the best of them, spinning and shuffling with unexpected rhythm. His peers cheering him on, Mr. Koch tripped the light fantastic with a sly grin. Naturally, The Observer joined the festivities, gamboling with Mr. Koch and his crew for a song or two. As Pitbull’s timeless anthem “Give Me Everything Tonight” was rounding out (“Baby, Ima make you feel so good, tonight,”), we asked Mr. Koch where he learned his formidable moves. “I spent a lot of time in the wrong places,” he said, continuing his singular Charleston undeterred.
editorial@observer.com

Outside the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, The Observer caught sight of designer Betsey Johnson storming by and leading a model on a metal chain. The model lifted her skirt and mooned the photographers. The model represented "anger" in a project of conveying the seven deadly sins (we didn't see any of the other six during the evening) and had expletives and "ANGER" written across her chest and arms in what appeared to be Sharpie marker. Was the model in pain? "Do dogs complain?" Ms. Johnson asked The Observer.

New ballet trustee Sarah Jessica Parker, chic in glittering Valentino, came down the carpet immediately after Ms. Johnson. "You should talk to Sarah Jessica!" said a P.R. flack attached to Ms. Johnson. Ms. Johnson looked abashed for a moment, and did not. Also dressed for the evening: Alexandra Lebenthal in teal tulle, with long train and ribbon in her hair. Was the tulle a tribute to ballerinas? "That's interesting! I didn't even make the connection. My husband always fights with me because I yell at people for stepping on my train--but I love a train!"

Brooke Shields came down the red carpet next, and we asked the Broadway veteran what the difference was between a dancer and an actor. We'd been intrigued by dancers' monomaniacal, mercurial temperaments since seeing Natalie Portman in Black Swan--an interest compounded by Ms. Portman's beau Benjamin Millipied's recent freakout at a Times reporter who asked after Natalie. "There's a certain discipline that comes with the physical," said the ultrafit star. "You see unbelievable performances from actors who aren't that healthy, but dancers..." So they must be pretty boring, or crazy, right? "No! They've just been exquisite specimens, and committed... and fun!"

The program for the evening included both The Seven Deadly Sins, in which Ms. LuPone intoned the tragic story of a woman's loss of innocence in her travels across America, set to dance, and Viennese Waltzes, the George Balanchine classic writ large with a sumptuous forest set. 

For the designer Erin Fetherston--resplendent in purple of her own design, accompanied by her rock-star boyfriend Gabe Saporta--experimentation can't beat Balanchine. "I think I'm a sucker for the more classic. I love ballet-I want to learn so much more about it." She sat down, awaiting her halibut; the room's serene calm revealed nothing of the anti-Tea Party protests against the Koch family that had erupted outside the Koch Theater earlier in the evening. 

Patti LuPone had knocked out a terrific performance, the culmination of more than a year of planning and rehearsal, but she didn't look peaked at all as she stood on the dance floor, hugging one well-wisher after another. Though she's a master of her form, she said there'd been much to learn from Wendy Whelan, the lead dancer in The Seven Deadly Sins. "To watch her every night is perfection."

So, she hadn't fallen down the rabbit hole of Black Swan psychosis?

"No. And I hated the way they represented ballet." She paused for emphasis. "Haaaaated it." Another pause. "Big time."

Social fixture Coco Kopelman, digging into her mango sorbet, explained that she hadn't been familiar with the Brecht-Weill ballet: "1933's a little before my time."
There was Ms. Whelan, the dancer. Had she heard about Mr. Millipied--her New York City Ballet colleague--and his tantrum? She paused and looked unnerved, if gracefully so. "All I can say is ... I've never experienced anything like that."

We made our way past a crowded dance floor--now packed with boogieing social types showing off their best moves with the gusto of ballerinas--toward Vanessa Williams, the actress, who invited us to sit by her. Could she have been a dancer? Ms Williams replied, "Well, I did dance!" She amended: "I only took two years." Why stop? Never one to be unduly modest, Ms. Williams replied, "Because I could do singing and dancing and acting. I could do all three!"

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Edited by Daisy Prince

Click here for the week's best parties.

To begin with: You're going to be spending a lot of time at the Joyce.

First up, Larry Keigwin, from the 8th through the 13th, with a full-evening work called Dark Habits. Keigwin is always smart, witty, New Yorky. Not everyone likes him as much as I do, but here's your chance to judge for yourself. (He's also a charming dancer.)

Next, from the 15th through the 20th: One of my favorite choreographers, Doug Varone, also with a full-evening work, Chapters From a Broken Novel. Six years ago, I wrote here that his new work, Castles, was the best new dance piece I'd seen in a long time, and nothing that's come along since has changed my mind. What's so special? His unusual gift for combining kinetic excitement with humanity and highly charged emotion. I guess you could call it expressive excitement.

And then, from the 22nd though the 27th, the return of the Merce Cunningham Company, deep into its Legacy Tour--everything's moving inexorably to its self-imposed dissolution at the end of the year. This is absolutely required seeing for admirers of the late, great Merce; soon his work will be solely in the hands (feet?) of other companies.

And let's not forget the Foundress: The Martha Graham company is going to be at the Rose from March 15 to March 20. The novelties will be a revival of the Robert Wilson Snow on the Mesa (1995) and a new piece by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, but the most emotional program for many of us will be the one on the 17th celebrating Martha's collaboration with Isamu Noguchi: Appalachian Spring, Cave of the Heart and Embattled Garden.

Mark Morris? Yes, March 17 to March 27, at the Morris Dance Center, his studio across from BAM, with its intimate theater that can only accommodate under 200 people. He's bringing us a world premiere--Festival Dance, to a Hummel trio--and two New York Premieres: The Muir, to a group of Beethoven's arrangements of Scottish and Irish songs, and Petrichor, to a Villa-Lobos string quartet. Small pieces in a small space, but with big expectations. This, of course, is a must.

Trisha Brown? At the Dance Theater Workshop, on and off from the 15th to the 26th.

Yvonne Rainer? At the Baryshnikov Arts Center from the 16th to the 19th.

After all this, I give you permission to relax for a little while, to gear up for the return of New York City Ballet (May 4) and ABT (May 16).

At NYCB, a new version of the Weill-Brecht The Seven Deadly Sins, choreographed by Lynne Taylor-Corbett and featuring Patti LuPone. (Not, alas, Allegra Kent and Lotte Lenya, who starred in Balanchine's 1958 version.) Also Vienna Waltzes, La Sonnambula and Jewels. To be avoided if possible: Peter Martins' Thou Swell and Susan Stroman's For the Love of Duke.

At ABT: Don't miss the company premiere of Ratmansky's brilliant and hilarious The Bright Stream (a triumph when the Bolshoi brought it here several years ago). Also new works by Ratmansky and Wheeldon (oh yes, and by Benjamin Millepied). Plus an important revival: Tudor's Shadowplay.

As for the full-evening spectacles, it would be hard to say which is the bigger yawn, James Kudelka's Cinderella or John Neumeier's The Lady of the Camelias. Avoid both. But the old standbys will be up and running: Giselle, Swan Lake, Don Quixote, Coppélia, The Sleeping Beauty. Try to see Cojocaru in Don Q, Giselle or Beauty, Osipova in Coppélia or Beauty. And Murphy and/or Hallberg in just about anything--except Cinderella. Don't say I didn't warn you!

                        rgottlieb@observer.com

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 choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called Call Me Ben, combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as "Ben." (Hence the title.) Also on hand are über-gangster Meyer Lansky, the notorious Virginia Hill, the actor George Raft and a swirl of nightclubbish girls and fedora'd mobsters who've been given nothing remotely interesting to do. Classy, appealing Robert Fairchild is embarrassingly miscast as Bugsy/Ben; Jenifer Ringer is game but under-Hollywoodish as Hill. Santiago Calatrava's set has some silhouetted palm trees (whole lotta silhouetting going on) and a pretty desert backdrop remarkably similar to his pretty Pampas backdrop for Christopher Wheeldon's new Estancia. The commissioned score by the young, fast-track composer Jay Greenberg isn't good enough to be memorable but is far too good for the mess Barak has made of it. This "Ballet Dramedy," as it's billed, is the fifth of City Ballet's premieres this season (two to go), and the company's most bewildering offering in living memory.

Estancia, on the other hand, is completely lucid and, of course, being by Wheeldon, totally adroit. But it's bewildering in a different way-watching it is like falling through a crack in time. Utilizing a score by Alberto Ginastera that was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein in 1941 for Balanchine but never used by him, Wheeldon inexplicably backtracks to the kind of populist Americana that Kirstein had been promoting throughout the '30s: Pocahontas, Yankee Clipper, Filling Station, Billy the Kid.  A city boy with a yen for the primitive turns up in the Pampas and falls in with a band of gauchos (cowboys to us) and a gutsy gauchette. Guess what? He falls for her, and in two shakes of a horse's tail he's proved his worth by taming a wild mare. He's Tyler Angle; the cute mare is Georgina Pazcoguin; the lead horse is Andrew Veyette; and the Girl is Tiler Peck. Angle and Peck are soon in a conventional love duet with the usual swooning lifts, and all ends in a carefully orchestrated whoop-de-do that would be more effective if we hadn't all grown up on Rodeo and Oklahoma! Why is the brilliant Tiler Peck in this clichéd role, and hidden under unflattering Western garb? This is a lazy retro piece, but the audience had a good time. Or maybe they were just relieved by its sheer competence.

The big ABT premiere was the endless, pointless Lady of the Camellias, a John Neumeier full-evening effort created in 1978 for the Stuttgart Ballet, which specialized in mind-numbing story ballets. Yes, it's the famous tale of Marguerite Gautier which we know best as La Traviata. (It started life as a sensational novel by Dumas fils, who then dramatized it, providing Sarah Bernhardt with her most popular vehicle -- she played it more than 3,000 times and giving Garbo her greatest role in Camille.) In Neumeier's hands, Dumas' melodrama is more like a series of semi-animated tableaux vivants than a fully choreographed ballet-characters mill around more than dance around, except when Armand, the feckless hero, is flinging himself at La Dame's feet or is lofting her up, up and away in one of their countless passionate and nervous-making encounters. It's Masterpiece Theater on pointe. First-cast Julie Kent worked hard and is still a beauty, but she's a touch too old and refined for this kind of thing. Diana Vishneva actually made something moving out of it, but then she's a major dramatic artist-who deserves better. Also deserving better is Chopin, from whose music the score was badly patched together

ABT, HOWEVER, CAME through with the debut of the year: the glorious 24-year-old Bolshoi star Natalia Osipova in the role that I believe is her greatest success in Russia, Kitri in Don Quixote. She was an immediate standout in minor roles when the Bolshoi turned up here several years ago, and a sensation last year when ABT revealed her in Giselle and La Sylphide-her swiftness, her ease, her astounding elevation elicited gasps from hardened critics, and everyone else, too. Her Kitri was beyond anything. It's not only that she has that huge, sailing leap across the stage; it's that she simply rises straight up in the air with seemingly no preparation, and with total buoyancy. Ballerinas are often divided into three categories: jumpers, turners and balancers. Osipova is all three. She whirls around in supported turns with no effort, no strain, nothing but joy. Her fouettés are so strongly anchored that when she whips around, alternating singles and doubles, it's inconceivable that anything could go wrong, they look so easy and casual. And when her toe is planted on the stage and she balances-forever-it doesn't look like a feat, it looks as if she's so comfortable up there, there's no reason for her to come down. Osipova has a refined musicality made possible by all this formidable technique. Since she can do anything more or less perfectly and at top speed, she can afford to take her time-stretch a phrase here, speed it up there, as the music speaks to her. She's also pretty and charming, though her Kitri is more a forceful hoyden than an adorable one. If she has a flaw, it's that she's overworking her mouth: too smiley at moments, too pouty at others. But she'll learn.

So the ballet world has a new superstar. And yet her real importance may not lie in the sensational performances she's giving us now (later this season we'll have her Aurora and her Juliet). It's that she's raising the bar for female technique, the way Nureyev and Baryshnikov did for men. Every aspiring ballerina will be driven to catch up. And this won't be like the disaster of ballerinas emulating the excesses and vulgarities of the willful Sylvie Guillem; this will be a legitimate expansion of classical technique.

THE OTHER GREAT treat of recent weeks has been the School of American Ballet workshop performances at Juilliard: three impeccable, exhilarating exhibitions of superb training. Wheeldon's Scènes de Ballet, was originally created for an earlier workshop, is brilliantly devised to present the school's achievements at every age level. The kids look wonderful, from the littlest to those late teenagers graduating now into City Ballet and other companies around the country. Wheeldon's ballet is perfectly responsive to the occasion if not to Stravinsky's sophisticated score. (For that you have to go to Ashton's glittering, worldly version.)

The workshop proceeded through Balanchine's entrancing Valse Fantaisie, led by Claire Kretzschmar, a tall blonde with high technical polish and radiant stage presence, who's partnered with an elegant and self-possessed Peter Walker. The jubilant closer was Balanchine's Bourrée Fantasque, to the ravishing music of Chabrier (a Balanchine favorite)-it was a big hit in the early '50s, before inexplicably fading from the repertory. Three leading couples, a huge cast, a grand finale, wonderful Karinska costumes and French, French, French. It's a hit all over again.

This year's workshop was particularly satisfying and reassuring. New choreography may be as iffy as always, but the training of American dancers is clearly in the best of hands; and the staging of Balanchine ballets is secure as long as ex-dancers of his, like Suki Schorer (Valse Fantaisie) and Susan Pilarre (Bourrée), are here to remind us of what they once were like.

rgottlieb@observer.com

On that last score, at least, they can rest easy: The company has announced that next season will feature seven premieres, four retirement galas (Yvonne Borree, Philip Neal, Albert Evans and Darci Kistler), and not a single full-evening ballet! The big question is, which will prove the better deal, feast or famine?

Amid all this season’s Swans and Beauties and Juliets there have been two premieres—Peter Martins’ endless and tedious Naïve and Sentimental Music (already reported on here, and not on the schedule for next season), and a true peculiarity, The Lady with the Little Dog, by a young Russian choreographer named Alexey Miroshnichenko, who we hear has done some good work for the company’s Choreographic Institute. Here is a ballet about which absolutely nothing is right, except the highly exposed, beautiful bodies of its two principals, Sterling Hyltin and Andrew Veyette.

To begin with, the idea of making a ballet based on Chekhov’s deeply subtle and moving story is demented, even though the astounding Maya Plisetskaya already did it during the Soviet era. (She’s never been accused of good taste.) Did no one at City Ballet actually read this masterpiece before commissioning a ballet based on it? The score, by Plisetskaya’s husband, Rodion Shchedrin, is dull to the max. The dance vocabulary is 100 percent unoriginal—you can always spot a choreographer in trouble when he pours on the sexy lifts.

And then there’s the story. After some adorabilità involving eight guys in gray unitards, who are listed as “Angels” but cavort around like puppies, “Anna Sergeevna” and “Dmitri Dmitrievitch,” married though not to each other, appear in late 19th-century beach resort garb, along with her little dog. (It’s an inside job: The doggy belongs to Hyltin.) The couple meet, connect, and the next thing you know, the Angel-pups reappear and strip them down to their flesh-colored undies so that they can adulterate. (Yes, I know that’s incorrect usage, but you get the point.) Which is where the sexy lifts come in. And then—in what has to be a ballet first—poor Dmitri has to put his shirt back on, button it, climb into his pants, buckle his belt and zip up. And then he gets to zip up the back of Anna’s dress. And then the Angel-pups strip the lovers a second time, before they exit upstage hand in hand into a blazing light. For this Petipa and Balanchine (and Chekhov) lived and died?

The season—like all City Ballet seasons—has been a roller-coaster ride.

The lows, apart from the two new ballets, included Martins’ Romeo and Juliet, which is light on passion and pallid in atmosphere. I was eager to see the lovely young Kathryn Morgan’s Juliet, and her exquisite lyricism was the high point of the evening. Her Romeo, the usually satisfying Robert Fairchild, seemed clumsy beside her, but then Martins’ conception of Romeo is clumsy. The two of them seemed more like affectionate kids than burning, tragic lovers.

As for the rest of the cast, the nurse just can’t be played by a cute youngster doing shtick—Georgina Pazcoguin is simply miscast. But then City Ballet, unlike companies like the Royal Danes and Britain’s Royal Ballet, doesn’t have a tradition of using its mature dancers in character roles. (That’s why we get 20-year-olds as the grandparents in The Nutcracker.) In this Romeo, though, we do get the definitely mature Darci Kistler and Jock Soto as the Capulets, and their coeval, Albert Evans, as the Prince. In fact, we get a lot too much of them. Joaquin De Luz was a virile and properly threatening Tybalt.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Balanchine’s great story ballet, was uninspired. Who Cares? was humdrum except for a ravishing Tiler Peck in the sublime Patricia McBride solo, “The Man I Love.” Peck is the company’s most musical dancer; her wit, intelligence and charm add up to glorious phrasing. Whereas Ana Sophia Scheller, for all her polished technique, shows no expressivity. She gives you the steps accurately and smoothly, but she doesn’t give you the dance; her “My One and Only” is efficient, but hardly Gershwinian. Sterling Hyltin’s praiseworthy “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” would be more effective if she reined in her long, blond ponytail—it distracts from her dancing.

And then there was a misbegotten revival of one of Balanchine’s less-than-major works, Cortège Hongrois, which he manufactured in 1973 as a farewell gift to Melissa Hayden. It has two contrasting groups of dancers—classical and folk—and it employs the wonderful music Glazounov wrote for Raymonda. (Balanchine had used this music twice before.) This season the Czardas couple—Rebecca Krohn and Sean Suozzi—were terrific, tearing up the stage and giving their all, as they both always do. Unfortunately, the classical couple was subpar: Maria Kowroski is gorgeous, and in the right roles (Titania, “Diamonds,” Slaughter on Tenth Avenue) she can be stunning, but she doesn’t have the strength, the command, the dance authority for this kind of role, and she clearly knows it. As a result, she appears tentative—a fatal quality here. Far worse, however, was the classical corps, obviously under-rehearsed if rehearsed at all. These girls are the responsibility of the principal ballet mistress, Rosemary Dunleavy. Where was she?

I can guess: working with them on the revival of Peter Martins’ The Sleeping Beauty. And it was worth it. The first performance, with a cast from heaven, was the most satisfying evening I’ve had at City Ballet in a decade. This is Martins’ finest work as a choreographer-stager. He’s loyal yet not slavish to the Petipa text; the story is clearly, sympathetically told; he’s trimmed it judiciously and added effectively to the divertissement. It’s a swift Beauty, but it doesn’t seem rushed—attention is paid. And this time around, someone has actually worked on the mime—maybe Martins himself; after all, coming from the Danish school, he must know it well.

Not a single one of the company’s seniors was on the stage, holding things back. Here were the best and the brightest, beginning with Ashley Bouder as Aurora. She has superb technique—it’s been evident since she first stepped on the stage 10 years ago—but she’s softened it, refined it, and found a lovely youthful approach to the part: lovingly attentive to her parents; excited by her birthday party and the four magnificent princes summoned for her inspection; and well up to the technical demands of the “Rose Adagio,” apart from an unsteady moment or two. Not only was she strong, but throughout—and particularly in her solos—she demonstrated subtle and delicious phrasing. And she rose to an appropriate maturity and regality in the climactic pas de deux. Her handsome Désiré, Andrew Veyette again, gave the most secure classical performance I’ve seen from him. And what a relief that in Sleeping Beauty, he didn’t have to strip.

Another of the company’s most talented young ballerinas, Sara Mearns, was a blooming Lilac Fairy—expressive as always, open, full; more feminine, perhaps less emphatic, than the usual Lilac. Tiler Peck again revealed her musical brilliance as the best Princess Florine I’ve seen in years—more than holding her own opposite Daniel Ulbricht’s flashing Bluebird. And then we had the treat of welcoming back Merrill Ashley, thrillingly malign as ever as her black rattlesnake of a Carabosse. She began with the company in 1967—yes, that’s 43 years ago.

There was no dead weight in this performance. The company looked revitalized. The theater’s new acoustics enhanced Fayçal Karoui’s vigorous conducting. Balanchine’s wonderful “Garland Dance,” wisely included by Martins, carried us right back to Petipa and 1890, and gave great joy. But then so did the entire performance.

rgottlieb@observer.com

But today, Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg News wonders whether City Opera isn't "squander[ing] good will" by caving to financial pressures:

Weirdly, Steel and Company had a critical and box office hit this season with Christopher Alden’s lively production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” That was back in November. Instead of capitalizing on the critical good will and revived box office that show prompted, City Opera continues to act like the leper of Lincoln Center, begging for dispensation while offering little hope for the future.

Then again, City Opera has always been something of an underdog. The Observer's Zachary Woolfe described one opening in November:

Opening night at New York City Opera felt like New York City Opera can sometimes feel: like the Metropolitan Opera, but scrunched up. Rather than unfolding majestically along Lincoln Center like the Met's, City Opera’s red carpet was crammed into the lobby.