By Robert Gottlieb 9/27/11 9:39pm

Culture

Ocean's Kingdom 7

Paul McCartney and Peter Martins’s Soggy Ocean Kingdom

The cows in Stella Gibbons’s immortal Cold Comfort Farm are named Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless, and that more or less is the verdict on Ocean’s Kingdom, the wildly hyped and wildly uninteresting collaboration between Peter Martins and Paul McCartney. (Sorry—Sir Paul McCartney; no P.R. release or press mention omits the knighthood.) If only Gibbons had given us a fifth cow: Endless. Read More

By Robert Gottlieb 6/09/10 1:44am

The Good, the Bad, and a New Ballet Superstar

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