Ari

Spacey may not be a director or theater administrator, but he does have a background in theater. He was classically trained at Juilliard, whose drama school is one of the best in the world, and was a stage actor before making it big in films.

At a recent performance of South Pacific at the Arena Stage in Washington, the pre-performance announcement asked people to turn off "anything that beeps, flashes, or rings," and went on to enumerate all the possibilities. The announcement ended with the request that, "however much you love the songs, please refrain from singing along." This should be adapted for ballet purposes to, "please do not hum along."

These were the stories in the Boston papers (put up on the Friday, Jan. 31 Links thread):

• Boston Globe
  
• Boston Herald
  

I guess I'm in the minority here, but I liked Morris's little dance. Not as a work of art, a full-scale ballet, because it wasn't that, but as "writing." Morris's fluency in putting together steps and movements, the way he uses his dancers, his innate sense of structure, and above all his musicality, are things you just can't see almost anywhere else in ballet these days (in new works). He makes his peers look like imitation choreographers.

Tchaikovsky also started, but never finished, an opera of Romeo & Juliet. He later recycled the music for the love duet into a lyrical orchestral piece that formed the heart of . . . let's see, what was the name of that obscure little ballet . . . oh, yes, Swan Lake. The second act adagio.

The original vocal duet was given at the opening gala of NYCB's Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981. It sent everyone out to the intermission smiling.

Now that I no longer live in New York, I've come to rely on Priceline for hotels. Some of you may be familiar with the system — you bid on a room in a hotel of your choice of location and rating (two to five stars) and if your bid is accepted, you are booked for that room (you don't discover the name of your hotel until after your bid is accepted). It sounds risky, but I've used it three or four times and have been pleased. Last year I paid $100/night for a room at the Hilton (once the one on Sixth Ave. in the Fifties, and once the one on 42nd St.). The best deals come as close as possible to your date of stay.

Now I'm even more confused about your topic, Grace. In your first post, you wrote:

But in your last post you said that you didn't mean that the Balanchine ideal is sweeping the world (as I'd rephrased what I thought you said).

So, in what way do you see ballet as having become globalized/Americanized? I'm just trying to understand your point. :confused:

Grace, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying (or exploring ). Is it that the Balanchine ideal is sweeping the world (an idea I'd challenge, anyway) because he was American? Do you think that if he'd stayed in France, for instance, and developed his own company there, that his influence would be less powerful? Are you concerned with globalization because it eradicates differences among local traditions, or because it's the American behemoth imposing itself on other cultures?

Off the topic somewhat, you also mention that Australian culture used to be based on English culture (as was true of all former British colonies, including the US). Don't you think that could be called the Anglicization of the indiginous cultures?

What's interesting about this review is the fact that the critic is an experienced balletgoer who has, as Leigh infers, seen much better. Most small town critics (and, sadly, some large town critics) know little if anything about ballet and are very easily pleased (or else are under an unspoken mandate to be boosterish about local talent).

I would hope that the critic's background would teach his readers something about the art form. But there are those — I've met some myself — who dislike critics who are "too critical." They think there must be something wrong with someone who "doesn't like anything."

I did a little research into On Your Toes, using Frederick Nolan's biography of Lorenz Hart. Here is what I learned:

On Your Toes was originally conceived as a film musical, an RKO vehicle for Astaire and Rogers. They wrote an outline and a few songs about a former vaudevillian who gets mixed up with the world of ballet and a temperamental ballerina before returning to the sweet girl he really loves. Astaire was intrigued, because he’d never worked with Rodgers & Hart, but ultimately rejected the idea because he felt that the public wouldn’t accept him in anything but a top hat, white tie and tails. (He would later change his mind, of course; Shall We Dance contains some similar plot elements, and Astaire actually plays a ballet dancer! The stage version of OYT salutes Astaire in its title song.) R&H took the idea back to Broadway, and Hart asked Balanchine to do the choreography, to which he enthusiastically agreed. Here is Nolan’s summary of the plot:

Junior, son of vaudevillians Phil and Lil  Dolan, forsakes his hoofer heritage and goes to Knickerbocker University to study music; there he meets and falls in love with co-ed Frankie Fayne.  Their fellow student Sidney Cohn is writing a a jazz ballet, “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue;” Frankie’s friend Peggy Porterfield tries to sell it to a Russian ballet company.  The prima ballerina, Vera Barnova, is attracted to Junior and wants to do the ballet (and thus snare Junior), but Sergei Alexandrovich, the head of the company, says no.  Complications ensue, with Junior plunged unreadily — and ruinously — into a performance of the “La Princesse Zenobia” ballet.

Misunderstandings between Junior and Frankie follow.  “Can a good man be in love with two women at the same time?” he asks Peggy.  “Only if he’s very good,” she tells him.  Meanwhile Vera’s other swain, ballet dancer Morrosine, is in trouble with gangsters, to whom he owes money.  Peggy confronts Sergei and threatens to remove her million-dollar patronage unless “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” is performed.  Junior is chosen to dance it over Morrisine, who pays a hit man to bump off “Juniorvich Dolanski” during the performance.  Warned that a gangster is in the audience, the exhausted Junior has to keep on dancing till the cops arrive.  Of course, true love conquers, and it all works out just fine.

Balanchine is quoted in the book as saying that the “Slaughter” ballet was Hart’s idea. The original cast was Ray Bolger as Junior, Doris Carson as Frankie, Luella Gear as Peggy, Monty Wooley, in his acting debut, as Sergei, and Tamara Geva (replacing the originally announced Marilyn Miller) as Vera. George Abbott wrote the book and directed.

During reheasals, a friend of Hart’s named Bender was much in evidence; he liked to hang around the young male dancers. He was so occupied during a reheasal when Balanchine, awaiting the overdue entrance of the Nubian slaves for the Princess Zenobia ballet, called out, “Ver de hell is de zlaves?” Hart sang out, to the tune of “There’s a Small Hotel” (the show’s best-known song),

The show opened to great reviews and was one of Rodgers' and Hart’s biggest successes. It was revived on Broadway, to similar success, in the early 80s, with Natalia Makarova as Vera. The recording of that revival (sans Makarova, who had a non-singing role) was recently re-issued on the Jay label and can be ordered from Amazon using the link at the top of the page. It’s the only recording that contains the complete music to Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.

Originally posted by Alexandra

To play Devil's Advocate on the Gottlieb-NYCB Board case, what if the acrimonious parting was because Gottlieb generally disagreed with Martins' policies?  Does he then have to remain silent for life?  If that were the case, I would see it as a very different situation from one in which someone had been fired and is bitter and wants to "get" the person who fired him.

Gottlieb did have major disagreements with Martins over policies; I didn't mean to imply that it was all a clash of personalities. And he continues to differ with Martins over certain substantive matters. But his writing on NYCB has a highly emotional, bitingly personal quality that stems from his personal involvement. He is certainly entitled to blast Martins in print, but not, I think, as a critic. Readers have a right to expect a certain objectivity — or attempt at objectivity — in a professional critic who writes regularly for a newspaper. (With a magazine, it's different. Because those reviews come out some time after the performance or season under review, they function less as "consumer guides" and don't have the effect of endless repetition.)

While I agree with you, Alexandra, about the way things should be, not all editors seem to care about such matters. In the 1970s, the dance critic for London's Daily Telegraph was the husband of Royal Ballet ballerina Lesley Collier. While he did not, I believe, review her performances, he certainly did review the company's. (Most of the reviews I remember were fawning.) Right now, Bob Gottlieb is reviewing dance for the New York Observer and unleashing tremendous, repeated invective against Peter Martins, despite the well-known fact that the two of them worked together at NYCB and parted acrimoniously. In this case, I wouldn't blame the company for asking the Observer to replace Gottlieb, although I don't think the paper should bow to any company's demands. I'm just surprised that there hasn't been more protest from other, non-NYCB connected, people. Or maybe there has and we just don't know of it.

In Whelan's case, the problem may be that most of the new works she dances have been made for the Diamond Project, which has a notoriously short gestation period for new ballets. If NYCB allowed choreographers more time to get acquainted with the dancers they're working with (and with the company itself, since many Diamond choreographers come from far outside NY), they might see more depth in what their instruments have to offer.

How about a third choice, like, "A carefully tended repertory with several new ballets a season?" That's what I'd vote for.

Why is there no performance on Saturday evening? Very odd.

Didn't Anton Pankevich study at SAB? I recall his name from Nutcrackers past. (If he is with the Royal, perhaps he was the American that Ferguson referred to!)

No Sleeping Beauty? :confused: They haven't done it since 2000. And it's Martins's best work for the company.

I hope that Somogyi will get to do Ballet Imperial (I just can't get my tongue — or keyboard — around the music title Balanchine gave it).

La Boheme will be eligible for a Tony in the Best Revival of a Musical category, says Playbill:

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/77389.html (next to last paragraph)

The same article says that Twyla Tharp's Movin' Out will be eligible in the Best Musical category.

On another thread, Alexandra said something about how companies for which "the classics" are important have to develop a "cookie cutter corps." I've been thinking about this, because my first reaction to this statement was that it isn't necessary to have a corps of perfectly cut cookies.

I'd like Alexandra to expand a bit on her definition of a cookie cutter corps. Do you mean identical in the physical sense — height, proportion, bone structure, etc. — or in training and style? Or both? (I'm assuming, from the context in which you wrote, that you weren't talking about strict precision in the way the dancers moved.) What kind of uniformity do you think is necessary?

I wonder if the notion of a group of near-identical girls (we are talking about girls here, aren't we?) isn't quite modern — perhaps the last 40 years or so. Photos and videos of earlier dancers — Russian as well as Western — certainly reveal a great many less-than-ideal physiques. It might have something to do with the more revealing costumes of the recent past: photos of the original casts in Petipa's and Ivanov's ballets show dancers so heavily draped in muslin that it's hard to see much of their bodies at all.

What do you all think? Have you seen performances in which the lack of uniformity in the corps (and please define what kind of uniformity you're talking about) detracted from the ballet for you? Or performances that were marred by too much uniformity? We're taking about 19th century white ballets here — Swan Lake, Giselle, et al.

Hi garnet, and welcome to Ballet Alert!

I checked the EU's website for duty information, but the page with that information wasn't available. But you can try http://www.eurunion.org/legislat/customs.h...#TARIFFSCHEDULE and see if it works better later on.

It's possible that the EU waives all duties on books. The U.S. government does.

Grace, when you edit a post, are you clicking on "Reset Message?" Clicking that undoes all your edits and causes the message to revert to its previous, unedited form. You should just click "Save Changes." There's no way I know of to preview an edited post.

The ballets that Anderson mentions are demi-caractère ballets, which are not in fashion right now.

Another reason may be that since the sixties, anything celebrating America has a negative implication. When NYCB first performed Stars & Stripes in Paris, the audience booed.

Originally posted by Leigh Witchel

Interestingly, and I can't recall the source for this, but I know that an opinion expressed was that had Leclercq been able she would have been in Agon, but in the second pas de trois - Melissa Hayden's role rather than Adams'.

This is interesting, Leigh — do you recall who said that? Arlene Croce once wrote that in using Adams in the pas, Balanchine was essentially creating by proxy for Le Clerq.

An OT in response to carbro's OT:

A course in ethics is an accreditation requirement for all U.S. law schools. And it's not a theoretical course, or an attempt to instil values. It's a pragmatic examination of situations in which a lawyer might find himself in violation of the government's Code of Ethics for lawyers, which is complicated and confusing. (And yes, most of them were stiffened after Watergate!) For instance, if you are representing one party to a lawsuit, no one else in your firm may represent, or be in any way involved with, the opposition. That's clear. But what happens if a new lawyer in your firm came from the firm representing the opposition? The concern is the confidentiality of information . . . but I won't bore you with that.

That's okay, Dad. Maybe someone saw your post who might have missed it otherwise. We're all on a learning curve.