Monday, November 18, 2024The Joyce's closed it's 2017-2018 season with the return of The Sarasota Ballet. With Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami visiting in June and Sarasota Ballet last week, New Yorkers and Tri-Staters got a good look at Florida's thriving dance scene. (Miami City Ballet comes to City Center in the fall.) The August 18 matinee exemplified the excitement with a ballet not seen locally in a decade, another glimpse at the company's enviable Frederick Ashton repertory, and a guest appearance by Marcelo Gomes. Program B opened with Christopher Wheeldon's There Where She Loved. Created for The Royal Ballet in 2000, it was last
Author: Patricia Contino
Feature: Leonard Bernstein’s Secular Liturgical Music
Saturday, August 25 is the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein's birth. During the upcoming weekend, Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's Berkshires summer home where "Lenny's" conducting career began as a student in 1940 and ended with his last concert months before his death in 1990, and London's BBC Proms offer non-stop Bernstein. The classical music streaming service Medici.tv is offering a week of Bernstein archival footage and documentaries. For those who want to keep the music going there is Sir Antonio Pappano and the The Santa Cecilia Orchestra's new release of Lenny's three symphonies. Additionally, since musical milestones are aimed at
Theatre: The Bridge Production Group presents ‘The Blue Room’ at the WhiteBox Art Gallery
Over one year, He (Max Hunter) and She (Christina Toth) rekindle their relationship through the lives of others. Some encounters are planned. Others random. Rich, poor, powerful, destructive, creative, desperate, and middling hook up and movie on, leading back the original prostitute. That's David Hare's slow-burning look inside The Blue Room, now playing with its two excellent leads at the WhiteBox Art Gallery. Hare borrowed the premise from the Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 sex farce Reigen (Roundelay). The playwright got into trouble with Anti-Semitic Viennese censors and critics, but the play nevertheless became an international hit. It is also a film classic, Max Ophüls's La ronde (Round,
Dance: ‘Four Quartets’ at Bard/Summerscape
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) has the pride of place among Dead White Authors. His posh boarding school, Ivy League and ex-pat background makes him untouchable in English departments and on bloggie lists of "GREATEST WRITERS EVER." Still, there are times when the heart of even an overrated writer's work created at the expense of a mentally-ill first wife is laid bare. Thanks to choreographer Pam Tanowitz and her company, composer Kaija Saariaho, artist Brice Marden, musicians of The Knights and most of all actress Kathleen Chalfant, Eliot's Four Quartets's is not for post-docs alone. It is unfortunate that there were only three performances of this
Dance: The Joyce Ballet Festival
The annual Joyce Ballet Festival showcases the incredibly high level and high-energy of American ballet. This is a time of reflection, renewal and reconfiguration in ballet, and the two companies described here are conduits of that positive change. Dimensions Dance Theatre of Miami (June 26-27) Ballet may never rate as high as Disneyland, but Miami now has two major dance companies Dimensions Dance Theatre, founded in 2016 by former Miami City Ballet married principles Carlos Guerra and Jennifer Kronenberg, opened The Festival on June 26. Founded in 2016, the company's gifted, personable dancers have already mastered an eclectic repertory. Guerra and Kronenberg themselves
Dance: Sarah Lane’s debuts her Kitri in ABT’s ‘Don Quixote’ at the Metropolitan Opera House
One way of defining a performance is that it is an experience of shared hopes between artists and their audience. Sometimes the final result exceeds the good wishes and anticipation. That's what happened during the Saturday, June 30 matinee of Don Quixote when American Ballet Theatre Principal Sarah Lane resoundingly danced her first Kitri, one of ballet's most difficult and fun roles. What made Lane's debut memorable has a great deal to do with Marius Petipa's boisterous 1869 ballet and Alexander Gorsky's 1902 dance-as-drama re-staging of it (ABT Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie and Ballet Mistress Susan Jones based their 1995 production
Theatre: HERE’s Dream Music Puppertry Program presents ‘American Weather’
A steel hula hoop spins. When if falls it becomes a container. Then the container's soft outer lining forms, depending on one's point of view, a bed, boat or coffin. Deliberate randomness forms the strong visual story told by Chris Green's American Weather at HERE's Dorothy B.Williams Theatre. Thanks to Green and his collaborator's masterful multidisciplinary combination of puppetry, video, song, verse and live action, American Weather's barometer reads division. This self-contained stage storm is played out across a picket fence with sharp edges. Katie Melby is the slow-moving soul in front of the fence/screen and a puppet costumed as a fencer in back of it. The
Theatre: Elevator Repair Service performs Kate Scelsa’s “Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf” at Abrons Art Center
Playwright Kate Scelsa and her Elevator Repair Service colleagues are completely at ease with Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf, a raucous re-imagining of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha, perennial frontrunners for the unhappiest theatrical couple of all time, keep the gin, insults and laughs coming at Abrons Art Center. One is hard-pressed to find humor in Albee's peak into a marriage whose only common ground is destruction. The 1962 Tony winner is also something of a sacred cow because with the right actors (Liz and Dick in Mike Nichols' 1966 film, the 2005 Broadway revival starring Kathleen Turner
Theatre: What Will the Neighbors Say presents ‘The Diana Tapes’ at HERE
During Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's touching marriage ceremony, cable hosts and invited "experts" still called his parents' nuptials "the wedding of the (20th) century." Among the embarrassing lack of research (identifying celebrity guests but not most of Harry's extended family or cellist Sheku Kanneh-Maso and the music he played), the worst was insisting that the July 1981 wedding was romantic. Both then and now, the event watched by millions reveals a very nervous teenager who on that day became so famous that she would be known by her first name. A defining chapter of Diana's life is the subject
Theatre: Isabella Rossellini’s ‘Link Link Circus’ at BAC
Fans of Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno will love Link Link Circus, her "from the waist up" follow-up at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. So will animal lovers, TED Talk types and theatergoers with a sense of humor. Surrounded by her collection of wooden and wind-up childhood toys, Rossellini is the ringleader/lecturer (is there really any difference?) sharing her love and knowledge of animals. Unlike certain celebrity activists, she practices what she preaches with an Master's Degree in Animal Behavior - hence the Link Link - from Hunter College. Then along with her honorary PhD from the University of Quebec at Montreal, she is