Farrell Fan

Ari posted a link to an article in the Guardian, "Troubled Royal Ballet eyes US director." In the first sentence, Kevin McKenzie is referred to as "the unsettled artistic director (sic) of the American Ballet Theatre." Later in the piece, it's stated "American Ballet Theatre has undergone huge turmoil, with talk that its new patron and chairman Lewis S. Ranieri railroaded McKenzie into a dance tribute to the Beatle George Harrison." I'd like to know if there's anyone out there who thinks McKenzie's position at ABT is "unsettled." It was news to me.

My impression is that the term "abstract ballet" fell into disfavor quite a long time ago and was supplanted by "plotless ballet" In this past August's Dance Magazine, Clive Barnes recalled the time around 1950: "In those days people referred--usually unkindly--to 'abstract ballet.' Denying the possibility of abstraction, (I wrote, 'Show me an abstract man and I'll perhaps show you an abstract ballet'), I made what I think was my one and only contribution to the vocabulary of dance criticism, suggesting the use of the word 'plotless' in place of 'abstract.'" Both the terms "abstract ballet" and "plotless ballet" were used to describe some works of Balanchine. But Balanchine (before the days of political correctness) said, "Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot."

Men in tights. Women in tutus. Audiences in tears.

I've read the book and enjoyed it enormously. It's an interesting assortment of muses -- from the tragic Elizabeth Siddal (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to the self-promoter Yoko Ono. Two of the muses I already knew something about -- Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson's friend (despite Francine Prose's designation, I don't think she qualifies as a muse), and the ballerina-muse to whom you allude. But I found the other portraits equally fascinating.

I like going to the ballet alone, provided I see people I can talk to at intermission -- among them Ballet Alerters Bobbi and Morris Neighbor. But I also like going with others. I'm going to Washington alone later this month for the Farrell season, but of the five performances I have tickets for, I'm going solo only once. That will probably be the night I go backstage. I still get that feeling of nervous excitement before the curtain goes up, regardless of how often I've seen the ballets on the program, and whether or not I'm accompanied.

Ballet -- not effete, not elite, just really neat. Ballet -- it's like baseball without the spitting. Ballet -- forget the fairy dust; these are fairies that sweat.

I concur that Leonard Lopate is an excellent interviewer, particularly of authors. He always sounds as though he's actually read the book in question. I don't know what the Chicago Tribune person did to provoke such a smart-alecky response from Ms. Bentley, but on the Lopate interview she was polite, intelligent, informative, and self-possessed. I fail to see what was embarrassing about anything she said. The only thing that bothered me slightly was Lopate's references to her as a former "ballerina" with NYCB, "great dancer,"etc. She was in the corps, and wrote an unforgettable book about that experience, "Winter Season." As is well-known, she also co-wrote Farrell's autobiography, "Holding on to the Air." In answer to Lopate's question about what she plans to write next, she said, "an erotic memoir and a book about Lincoln Kirstein." What's not to like?

Thanks, BW. It may not be everything I need to know about Labanotation, but it's certainly enough. Years ago, I bought a book on the subject (I don't know if it was the one by Ann Hutchinson referred to here) but I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters. No fault of the system. I never learned to read music, either. I guess I prefer words to symbols.

Hi yourself, rkoretzky, I was hoping you'd respond to this. Coincidentally, the first year Alice and I went to SPAC was 1978, the summer Baryshnikov joined the company. (It was just a coincidence.) But for years after that, we came just for the New York City Ballet Guild weekend. In a sense I'm glad the Guild dropped that trip. It finally led me realize I could stay a whole week. BW, I too love seeing NYCB at SPAC. Not only do the dancers look more relaxed, the audience has a better time.

Today's NY Times reported: "The Martin Beck Theater on West 45th Street will be renamed for the illustrator Al Hirschfeld, in tribute to his running 76-year chronicle of the life of Broadway and its greatest performers...the theater would officially become the Al Hirschfeld on June 21, 2003, the artist's 100th birthday." Still amazingly productive, Mr. Hirschfeld more than deserves the honor. I wish, though, they'd chosen a theater with a name like "Royale" or "Imperial," rather than one already named for a now-forgotten someone. It reminded me of the disgraceful plan to rename Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall for this year's big donor. Be that as it may, it also made me think about the Balanchine Centennial in 2004. What better honor than to rename the New York State Theater the George Balanchine? The present name is little more than a source of confusion: why do the New York City Ballet and New York City Opera perform in the New York STATE Theater? Besides, the New York City Opera wants to leave and has complained for years that Balanchine's specifications deadened the sounds emanating from the stage. (NYCO wormed its way into the theater in the first place, but that's another, no longer relevant, story.) Don't get me wrong, I love NYCO. But they're right -- the theater was built to Balanchine's specifications, for his company. It was the site of the great culminating moments of his career. There was briefly some talk of renaming it for him after his death in 1983, but it came to nothing. The centennial of his birth provides another chance. It's time for New York City to recognize his contributions to the artistic life of the city and the world.

Mel Johnson is too discreet to mention it, but Opus 34 was by Balanchine, to music of Schoenberg. The entry in Repertory in Review begins, "A Balanchine 'weirdie' and no two ways about it." The reviewer Robert Sylvester is quoted, "The new ballet could better be called 'Operation Ghastly.'" Thank God I never saw it, but Major Johnson deserves a lot of credit for overcoming this traumatic event. I came to ballet late, at almost 30. My friend Alice took me to the Kirov at the Met in 1961 and we saw Swan Lake. I loved it and wondered "How long has this been going on?" As I've said on earlier threads, soon after that she took me to NYCB, and we saw Raymonda Variations. That's when I was really hooked. Soon after that we were married. Apropos the references to Nutcracker at the start of this thread, a friend of mine says he sat next to a woman at a performance a couple of years ago who told him she'd been going to Nutcracker annually for a long time, starting with when she used to take her daughter. On this occasion she was there with her granddaughter. So he asked her if she ever went to NYCB repertory performances. "No. I don't like ballet," she said.

Excuse this off-topic tangent. Inspired by last night's Emmy Awards, a friend and I came up with a brilliant idea over lunch today: a sitcom of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Plot summary for Episode One: Didi and Gogo wait for Godot. Plot summary for Episode Two: Didi and Gogo wait for Godot. And so on, until cancellation.

I think Watermill is absolutely correct. Mr.Schlender is being optimistic when he says, "There comes a time when you just have to turn off the rock music..." It's true that people used to "graduate" from the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller to Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, and then to Renata Tebaldi and the Philharmonic. But they don't anymore. People in their fifties are still tuned to the rock music.

I'm surprised to hear that. Here in New York, I've always thought of Houston Grand Opera as an innovative and successful company. Is this not the case?

A letter to contributors from the President of SPAC, reviewing the past season, says "Attendance was very strong this summer, with increases in the Philadelphia Orchestra and Freihofer Jazz Festival, a new record for sales receipts at the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival and most of the pre-performance talks were sold out. I infer that NYCB attendance declined, or at best was flat.

And while he didn't have a great voice, Fred Astaire was a great singer.

Yes, I saw Sills and Treigle in Giulio Cesare, and still remember the notes of Sills' "Piangero la sorte mia" (I shall weep for my fate) floating out from the stage of The New York State Theater without electronic enhancement. The acoustics didn't seem to bother anyone at the time, least all the critics from across the country who were in New York to cover the Met's opening fiasco and stayed to "discover" this great new star. Another unforgettable performance from that era was Treigle in Boito's Mefistofele, with Domingo as Faust.

I have absolutely no facts or statistics to cite, just my impressions. When I first started attending opera and ballet performances half a century ago, it seemed to me that the opera audience was older and conservative, the ballet audience younger and adventurous. Now the opposite appears to be the case. I'm thinking in particular of New York City Opera vs. New York City Ballet. Whenever I go to the former, the New York State Theater is filled and there's an air of excitement. (Despite all the NYCO complaints about the theater.) Too often at the ballet there are empty seats, and many of the people who are there seem to be attending out of duty or habit. Am I imagining this?

The subtitle of this book by Francine Prose is "Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired." I started reading it today and naturally enough began on Page 297, with the chapter on Suzanne Farrell. The chapter is nicely written and cogent. It is also based entirely on Farrell's autobiography, Holding on to the Air, and on the film Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse. So then I went back and read the introduction, where there is this paragraph I liked: "Perhaps uniquely in the lives of the muses, the partnership of Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine suggests that the roles of inspired and inspirer, artist and muse, can be divided and shared between a man and a woman, two artists collaborating to produce work that neither could accomplish alone. But this blurring of boundaries was not expressly acknowledged. Farrell was inevitably described as Balanchine's muse, and no one seems to have proposed that the reverse was also true." I'm sure I'll enjoy the book. The other eight muses are Hester Thrale (Samuel Johnson); Alice Liddell (Lewis Carroll); Elizabeth Siddal (Dante Gabriel Rossetti); Lou Andreas-Salome (Friedrich Nietzche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud); Gala Dali (Salvador Dali); Lee Miller (Man Ray); Charis Weston (Edward Weston); Yoko Ono (John Lennon).

I saw a wonderful production of Puccini's Triptych several decades ago at NYCO, with Beverly Sills, Placido Domingo, and Norman Treigle. The new production, which I saw last night, didn't erase those memories, but it's well worth seeing and hearing. The first of the one-act operas, Il Tabarro, is a melodrama of sex and violence, and came off the best, IMO. Mark Delavan is a worthy successor to the great bass baritones of NYCO's past -- Treigle and Samuel Ramey. His portrayal of Michele, the lovelorn husband, was memorable. Suor Angelica has always been the most problematic of the trio, and the current production, by shifting the setting from a cloister to a children's hospital, compounds the difficulties. The plot and dialogue no longer make sense. But the change does provide a poignant ending. After Sister Angelica commits suicide so as to rejoin her little son in heaven, instead of a vision of the Virgin Mary and the boy indicating forgiveness, we see a boy peering in at Angelica from the hallway. Thus, the ending is unsettling and ambiguous. Maria Kanyova was very affecting in the title role, and Ursula Ferri suitably imperious as her unsympathetic aunt. Ferri was also an earthy Frugola in Il Tabarro. Finally, Gianni Schicchi, Puccini's only comedy, brought the house down, largely due to the smart-alecky supertitles. Schicchi wants his funeral done "on the cheap." He won't leave much to charity because people will say it was "laundered money." All the cast, except for Schicchi and his daughter Lauretta, was in black and white modern dress. The walls were covered with b&w op-art wallpaper. When Rinuccio sang of Florence being like a flowering tree, the back wall was pulled away to show a panoramic photographic view of the city. It should have been thrilling and, indeed, some audience members applauded. But the view seemed out-of-focus to me. Lauretta's "O Mio Babbino Caro," was marred by constant laughter prompted by the inane supertitles and bits of stage business. The latter caused the audience to burst into applause before the aria was over. The soprano and tenor were okay, but Mark Delavan triumphed as Schicchi.

As a former advertising copywriter, I sympathize, to an extent, with whoever wrote the blurbs in the NYCB winter season brochure. But there is an over-fondness for adjectives that gets a little silly. "sublime" Concerto Barocco and Valse-Fantasie "dazzling" the Diamond Project as a whole "delightful" Western Symphony and Steadfast Tin Soldier "ebullient" Piano Pieces "intriguing" Sinfonia "captivating" Bach Concerto V "exquisite" Serenade "saucy" Slaughter on Tenth Avenue "arresting" Vespro "delectable" Soiree "entrancing" Morphoses "stunning" Reliquary "enchanting" Coppelia "astonishing" Square Dance "haunting" In the Night "witty" Fancy Free "dynamic" The Infernal Machine "romantic" I'm Old Fashioned "stirring" Pavane "rowdy" Western Symphony (again) "luminous" Vienna Waltzes "lively" Tarantella and Interplay "masterful" Chaconne "awesome" Haiku "incomparable" Symphony in Three Movements "fanciful" Coppelia (again) "astounding" Reliquary (again) While "awesome" is applied to just one ballet, "incredible" is used to characterize the whole of subscription series number 10.

That's the headline on a NY Times article today about the TV monitors that have been installed in the Brown Theater's balcony by the Houston Grand Opera. "Lee Wheatley, director of sales at the opera company, said it was difficult to measure OperaVision's impact on ticket sales, but he said more people were requesting seats upstairs to watch it. 'I think it makes the opera a little more accessible,' he said. 'It enhances your vision.'" This development holds the promise of further progress. Perhaps NYCB, say, could follow the lead of Letterman and Leno and tape its performances at five or six o'clock. This would please the early-curtain fans. The rest of us would go to the theater later and see the performances on television. ;)

I can hardly wait till our next intermission discussion, Bobbi!

Suzanne Farrell says that for quite a while after she retired she couldn't bear hearing music she'd danced to. Or, indeed, any music. She got over it when she started staging ballets.

I wonder if NYCB has had increased attendance on Tuesday nights because of the early curtain. Personally, I hate the early curtain and was relieved that NYCB hasn't extended it to other nights. On my Tuesday night subscription, the people to my right who always left early in the past, still left early despite the early curtain. If I had my way, I'd push the Broadway curtaintime back to 8:40, the way it was when I was a lad.