The New York Observer » Robert Gottlieb

Wheeldon by Three: A Triple Bill Brings out the Best in City Ballet’s Ballerinas

As ye sow, so shall ye reap. When a ballet company spends a lot of money on gimmicky pieces, it’s stuck with them for a while—they have to earn their keep. Likewise, when it spends a lot of money on an arid version of a classic, it too has to serve again and again. In its current season, City Ballet is reaping what it sowed: Yet another go round for Peter Martins’s arid, antiromantic Romeo and Juliet, and exhumations of the awful Lynn Taylor-Corbett Seven Deadly Sins (gimmick: Patti LuPone singing—badly—the Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya songs) and the awful Peter Martin Ocean’s Kingdom (gimmick: music by Paul McCartney). I can’t imagine any knowledgeable ballet-lover wanting to see any of these more than once. Read More

Necessarily So: Porgy and Bess May Not Be Known as a Dance Show but Its Choreography Can Make a Difference

Porgy and Bess has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it’s filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it’s front and center it isn’t crucial. Back in 1935 when it opened (at the Alvin Theater, on Broadway), it was reviewed by both the New York Times’s theater critic, Brooks Atkinson, and its music critic, Olin Downes. Atkinson never mentions the show’s dance component, and Downes has only this to say: “Admitted the instinct of Negroes to dance, did the inhabitants of Catfish Row set themselves in centrifugal patterns along the floor and wiggle hands and toes like the ladies who are auxiliary to a soloist’s performance in a revue? Of course this was amusing. So was the clogging of Sportin’ Life in the forest scene.” Read More

The Crack-Up: A Nutcracker Marathon—Four in Two Days—Saw Balanchine Fare Less Than Well on TV

It’s been a week of Nutcrackers—Nutcrackers to the left of us, Nutcrackers to the right of us, Nutcrackers wherever you look. And it’s been a mixed bag of nuts. Now it’s time to roll over, Tchaikovsky, and tell Beethoven the news.

But first, a dash through the four Nutcrackers I recently saw within two long days. Read More

The Long Goodbye: Merce Cunningham Has His Last Posthumous Turn at BAM

This past week marked a unique circumstance in the history of dance in America—the first time I can think of when a major figure took a last (posthumous) bow and shut up shop. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave four performances at BAM, featuring six of Cunningham’s major works, and apart from several Events—pieces being performed simultaneously on three stages (the audience wanders from one to another for 45 minutes) later in the month at the Park Avenue Armory—it has only a two-week season in Paris remaining before it permanently disbands. Read More

A Weekend of Song and Dance: Unflagging Invention in an All-Taylor Evening, and Ellington on Exhilirating Fast-Forward

Saturday
City Center
2:00 p.m.

The Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center blasted off their new collaboration with a spectacular show called Cotton Club Parade—all-singing, all-dancing, all-Ellington. (Even the non-Ellington numbers sound like his.) Of course a big theater like the City Center can’t replicate the feeling of an intimate place like the Cotton Club—for one thing, they didn’t have miking back in the day. (Lucky them.) And presumably a show at the club was relaxed: pauses between numbers; waiters passing through with drinks clinking; customers coming and going. Whereas the Parade is a semi-Broadway show, and one of its strongest virtues is that it’s driven at breakneck speed through its 23 numbers—its energy is never allowed to falter; even segues are ultraminimal. And there’s no intermission. But authenticity of venue isn’t the point. You leave the performance with a real sense of the variety, the ingenuity, the sheer fun of what things must have been like up on 125th Street in the ’20s and ’30s. Read More

Let’s Get It On: An Energetic Week of American Ballet Theatre

ABT nailed its contemporary colors to the mast for its recent one-week season at the City Center—no imported stars, no full-evening classics or faux-classics. Instead, Tharp (three pieces), Taylor (two), Cunningham, Ratmansky, Clarke (Martha) and Volpi (one each). Volpi? He’s the 25-year-old dancer from the Stuttgart Ballet, originally from Argentina, who was commissioned to create a new piece for the occasion. Read More

Falling Hard: Never Mind the Fall for Dance Festival’s Irritating Stocking Stuffers

This year the five Fall for Dance events—two performances each—sold out in five hours: a record. Hurrah for the series, hurrah for dance (sort of) and hurrah (definitely) for the immaculately refurbished City Center, which already looked scruffy when I started going there, in 1948. (I was pretty scruffy then, too, and no one has refurbished me.) Read More

Wherefore Art Thou, Radio? Shakespeare via Radiohead Is a Snappy Good Time and Veggetti’s Bacchae Is Powerful

Romeo and Juliet is easy—we know the story, after all. Still, choreographers can’t resist it, and the latest of them—Edward Clug (Romanian), head of Ballet Maribor (Slovenian)—does offer a new slant. First of all, Juliet survives. (Actually, we’ve encountered this approach before, in a spoof in which R. & J. both live on, in nearby Mantua, trapped in a bickering, after-the-bloom-is-off, you-take-out-the-garbage kind of marriage.) The new work—tricked out with handsome Renaissance-y back projections—also pulls a switch musically: not Prokofiev, not Delius, not Tchaikovsky. Instead, we have Radiohead, that portento-pop supergroup—which explains why the name of this ballet is Radio and Juliet. (Among the Radiohead numbers deployed: “Idioteque,” “Like Spinning Plates” and “We Suck Young Blood.”) Read More

Expert Witnesses: A Brilliant Spin in Rachid Ouramdane’s Concept Dance

In the mid-’90s, Arlene Croce brought down the wrath of the P.C. gods on herself when she refused to review a Bill T. Jones work called Still/Here on the grounds that it was victim art, and that “by working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism.” Today, long after the fuss has died down, the lesson is worth remembering. When confronted with AIDS, torture, the Holocaust, we can’t (and shouldn’t) turn off our human reactions, which means, however, that to a certain extent we have to turn off our critical faculties. Read More

City Ballet’s September Start

Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet’s ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. It’s unfortunate that this became possible only when the financially floundering City Opera was forced to decamp from the David H. Koch Theater. (To be fair, this is one thing we can’t blame on David H. Koch and his politics.) But at least the opera’s loss is dance’s gain. Read More

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

Alexei Ratmansky’s ‘Bright Stream’ Is Another Bright Spot; Royal Danish Ballet Fumbles at the Koch

A few years ago, the Bolshoi turned up in town with a program of four ballets, including the Stalin-approved (and ghastly) Spartacus, and something called The Bright Stream, which Stalin had banned in 1935, even punishing some of those responsible for it. Its entrancing Shostakovich score was buried in the Bolshoi archives until, in 2003, Read More

The Great ‘Giselle’ at ABT, Plus a Mixed Bag of the Old and the New

Whatever crimes ABT may have committed through the years--however many Cinderellas, Ladies of the Camellias, Snow Maidens, Pied Pipers, gimcrack Swan Lakes and Sleeping Beauties--they've made up for it this season by giving us another brief taste of the Royal Ballet's supremely gifted Alina Cojocaru in her greatest role, Giselle. Her one performance of it Read More

Sinners and Saints At City Ballet

City Ballet is having a schizophrenic season. The opening black-and-white Balanchine week was a triumph, and the further rush of Balanchine in the following weeks has given us the most satisfying programming in many years. Equally, the overall level of performance compared to what we've been experiencing for 20 years has been dazzling: not only Read More

City Ballet’s ‘Black and White’ Week Was, Ironically, Full of New Colors

You could say that City Ballet's opening "all black and white" week was a marketing gimmick, and you'd be right. But you could also say it was a highly instructive, even impressive, event, and you'd be right again. On the most basic level, it gave us seven programs with absolutely no dross--no second-tier Robbins or Read More