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 11/29/04 12:00am

The Pina Bausch Smorgasbord: Brooklyn’s Favorite Take-Away

Something’s always going on in a Pina Bausch extravaganza. In the old days, it was inevitably something grim-you felt that Bausch had internalized the malign mutterings of old Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm: “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” No more. Not that everything’s sweetness and light in the Pinaworld Read More