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
Watching an unsatisfactory performance of Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations like the one I saw in the final week of City Ballet’s winter season, you have to ask yourself where the problem lies. Is this the understandable exhaustion of a company that’s slogged its way through six weeks of Nutcracker, two weeks of Sleeping Beauty and six Read More
Peter Martins’ Swan Lake does its job—it gets people into the theater (all Swan Lakes get people into the theater), and then it gets them out of the theater in only two and a half hours. In other words, it’s efficient, and if efficiency is what you look for in ballet, this is the production Read More
