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I've always noticed that the men do not run 'into the floor'. They are always very light on their feet.

Is no one seeing this new production of NINE?

Okay, fine. Has anyone seen "A Little Night Music" this time around?

Adored it the 2nd time around (today).

Zellweger was robbed.

The Noble Fool, Chicago's Comedy Theatre is wrapping up it's run of "Vikings! A Musical in Two Axe", this Sunday. Music is by Bonnie Shadrake, book by Jack Bronis, and lyrics by Jack Bronis and Bonnie Shadrake. Jimmy Bins, the Artistic Director of The Noble Fool is lucky to have this writing team.

Author's Notes:

"The idea for "Vikings!" A Musical in Two Axe" came to me several years ago, when we were anxiously teetering on the edge of a new millenium. Exactly one thousand years before, the infamous invaders from the north were laying seige to their neighbors. It seemed like an intriguing idea to set a musical in the period halfway between the advent of Christianity and our own age. Exactly how much has humanity changed in a millenium? "Vikings! A Musical in Two Axe" is our attempt to answer that question".

It was interesting to see this play about one society invading another people's society. Though I knew the idea for this muscial was born before our current war, the message expressed was not so comical in light of current world events. The lush melodies composed by Bonnie Shadrake and of course the abundance of talented performers: Gary Alexander, Geoff Binns-Calvey, Sean Paul Bryans, Kevin Christopher Fox, Vanessa Greenway, Sarah Hayes, Mick Houlahan, Chuck Karvelas, Patricia Musker, Anne-Sheridan Smith, Darren Stephens, and Jean Winkler impressed me tremendously.

I have seen two other productions by The Noble Fool - "Flannigans Wake" which employs audience participation that the cast of superb imrov artists handles with great ease and with hysterical results.

I've also seen "Roasting Chestnuts", their Christmas comedy/musical. Patrica Musker, the star, is hands down amazing. She is a fine actress, singer and improv comedienne.

I go to NYC several times a year to see the best the world has to offer in theatre, but I am very glad to be in the second city with it's high caliber of theatre.

I hope to be able to report on The Goodman's new Sondheim muscial, this summer.

For anyone interested The Noble Fool has a website: www.noblefool.com.

"She had made no plans for the summer."

"She had made no plans for the winter".

Loved the original production, directed by Tommy Tune.

Has anyone seen the new version?

And though Vanessa Redgrave did a great job with the movie "Camelot", I would do just about anything to see a complete film of Julie on stage in in the play.

Did anyone see the Broadway production of "Camelot" with Julie Andrews and Richard Burton?

Sorry if this is off topic.

"From Kschessinska to me....."

Thanks for finding that for me Mel!

It had quite the original cast.

Elise Reiman was one of my teachers at SAB in 1970.

Recently, a friend of mine who works for the Balanchine Trust, showed me a video of Balanchine's "Haieff Divertimento".

The video I watched featured Wendy Whelan and Nilas Martins as the lead couple. I believe the ballet was originally choreographed for Maria Tallchief.

There were several short but wonderful solos in the men's section and the women had some very difficult pointe work. They actually waited their turn to dance, balancing en pointe. The pas de deux work was enjoyable to me. The ballet seemed different and similar in many ways to other Balanchine ballets. I did notice one short, exact passage from "The Four Temperaments".

The ballet in my opinion is worthy of a long life. It should be done often as so many others are. I wonder why I have never even heard of it in all my years of being a Balanchine/NYCB fan.

I was unable to find any info at the NYCB website. Has anyone seen this ballet with it's original cast or the more recent cast?

Also wanted to mention that Linda Kent was an incredible Taylor - stager. I worked with her on "Cloven Kingdom" and "Arden Court" and she was a good perfectionist.

This may be "stretching" it, but Romana Kryzanowsky, Paul Mejia's mother, was Suzanne Farrell's mother in law for a while.

I saw her many times giving private Pilates sessions to Ms. Farrell at the Pilates studio on 56th between 5th and 6th, back in the 80s.

Wow Alexandra! I can't imagine how incredible the original cast of ESPLANDE must have been, when several casts within the last two decades have moved me so. It's good to know that a masterpiece will hold through the years and changes of casts.

I'm sure BLACK TUESDAY was good at ABT. I was in the orchestra section but it just seemed too dark. I remember Beth Gaither standing out, but once again, why wouldn't Paul Taylor dancers do it best?

I did notice the Nijinsky references Nanatchka, and they were perfect with the Debussy music . That did not bother me at all. It was actually some of Paul Taylors trade mark movements that bothered me for two seconds. I had not seen the Taylor company in a long while. But as I said, two seconds into it, I was in love.

I am truly happy for the dance audience of Portland.

They've really been starved for the past fifteen years.

On the other hand, from where is the money coming?

It seems as if more money is being spent on this one season than Canfield was able spend in his whole tenure with the company. It's not just the wonderful ballets that are being acquired, but the company must be upsizing too.

Does anyone know the scoop?

Program C - Wednesday, March 12, 2003

IMAGES - Taylor/Debussy

BLACK TUESDAY - Taylor/Songs from the Great Depression

ESPLANADE - Taylor/Johann Sebastian Bach

Wow, City Center looks great these days and so does the Taylor company! Patrick Corbin is still a wonderful dancer and his fellow company members are equally impressive.

At the beginning of IMAGES, I thought the movement was almost dated. It gave me a sort of Agnes DeMille feeling. Then within minutes, the genius of Paul Taylor took over and I was finding it fresh and delightful. IMAGES with it's beautiful Debussy music is almost like a bed time story, soothing and hypnotic.

I like BLACK TUESDAY much more at City Center. The MET seemed to swallow it up when I saw ABT. Then again, how can any dancer other then a Taylor dancer do his choreography so well? Annmaria Mazzini was fearless in "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" section.

ESPLANADE is amazing every time. I still remember Betty De Jong and Linda Kent in the cast. The present company is gorgeous, especially Lisa Viola. It was hard to sit still for this one. I wanted to run and jump (but definitely not slide)!

;)

I'm not sure, but I think there is, or is to be a reconstruction of "Ondine" performed in Russia.

Has anyone seen the Washington Ballet (pre-National Ballet of Washington) version, with Mimi Paul as the doomed Naiad?

Looking forward to the Chicago book signing.

I saw a lot of NYCB performances in the late 70s and most of the 80s, but only saw "La Sonnambula" once. I remember Stephanie Saland as The Coquette and Darci Kistler as The Sleepwalker, but I don't remember who danced the Poet. Could it have been Robbie LaFosse?

Since reading about "La Sonnambula" in "Henning Kronstam, Portrait of a Danish Dancer" I wish to see the ballet again.

I bet Ballet Alert members have some favorite casts.

I've just begun Part III and I LOVE IT!

This book is easy to read and highly informative.

Fun stories - (Mamma Verdy and those scissors!)

Strongly recommended for new Ballet Alert members.

I think I've seen this duet in the Nureyev version.

Thanks so much for these reports Jeannie.

For me you are picking up where Suzanne Massie left off with her "Land of the Firebird".

Menoga, pazhalusta!!!!!!

More from Robert Johnson's article:

"Nevertheless, if Igor Stravinsky had had his way, the spirituality of the wedding would not have been visible on stage. The composer's original staging concept is described in his autobiography:

According to my idea, the spectacle should have been a divertissement.... I wanted all my instramental apparatus to be visable side by side with the actors or dancers, making it, so to speak, a participant in the whole theatrical action.... The fact that the artists in the scene would uniformly wear costumes of a Russian character while the musicians would be in evening dress not only did not embarrass me but, on the contrary, was perfectly in keeping with my idea of a divertissement of the masquerade type.

Though the idea of presenting the wedding as a kind of masquerade may seem anomalous now, Stravinsky's original inspiration, with all its primitivist and psychological appendages, was at least party humorous. Nicolas Nabokov, recalling the composer's search for a title, describes how the Russian title Svadebka was found:

One day Stravinsky and Diaghilev had a conversation about peasent marriages in Russia and Diaghilev remembered a peasant marriage.... and said (in Russian), "It was such a mad little marriage (Svadebka)." Stravinsky, who told me the story himself, jumped in the air and said "Wonderful!" It really meant the women all weep and the men all get drunk..."

More from the Robert Johnson article:

"The way Bronislava Nijinska immediately saw "Les Noces" was affected by the intensity of her life in revolutionary Russia. Nijinska had only recently returned from Kiev, and when Diaghilev asked her to mount "Les Noces", in her own words, "I was still breathing the air of Russia, a Russia throbbing with excitement and intense feeling. All the vivid images of the harsh realities of the Revolution were still part of me and filled my whole being".

Nijinska's vision also grew out of a keen appreciation of the emotions of the Bride and Groom. Although Stravinsky had made these emotions clear in his score, he preferred to ignore them when it came to staging the work. Nijinska, in her recollection of the ballet's creation, discusses them at length:

"I saw a dramatic quality in such wedding ceremonies of those times in the fate of the bride and groom since the choice is made by the parents to whom they owe complete obedience-there is no question of the mutuality of feelings. The young girl knows nothing at all about her future family nor what lies in store for her. Not only will she be subject to her husband, but also to his parents. It is possible that after being loved and cherished by her own kin, she may be nothing more in her new, rough family, than a useful extra worker, just another pair of hands. The soul of the innocent is in disarray-she is bidding good-bye to her carefree youth and to her loving mother. For his part, the young groom cannot imagine what life will bring close to this young girl, whom he scarcely knows, if at all.... From this understanding of the peasant wedding, and this interpretation of the feelings of the bride and groom, my choreography was born. From the very beginning I had this vision for "Les Noces".

Nijinska's experience during the Revolution and her instinctive sympathy for the two young people in Stravinsky's scenario led her to hear "Les Noces" primarily as an expressionistic work, and to value the music's spiritual qualities above all others. This in turn, led her to a specific source of inspiration for her choreography, the art of Russia's icon painters and archaic mosaicists. Nijinska had ample opportunity to study the work of these traditional masters, for Kiev's Chathedral of St. Sophia has some of the finest mosaics and icons in Russia. In this spare and powerful art she encountered a spirituality not unlike that of Stravinsky's music, and also related to the nature of the marriage rite as she perceived it. In taking inspiration from such traditions, the choreographer, like the composer, joined the ranks of the primitivists".

About dancing en pointe in "Les Noces".

"Nijinska is reported to have told Diaghiliev, "Noces is a ballet that must be danced on point. That will elongate the dancers' silhouettes and make them resemble the saints in the Byzantine mosaics. When the Bride's sad faced escort of maidens rises on point and begins to bourree in place, their toes shoes seem to flicker beneath them, like votive flames beneath the solemn images of a Russian church".

In the not too distant past there were posts about the text for the score of Stravinsky's "Les Noces". I recently read a 1987 article by Robert Johnson - RITUAL AND ABSTRACTION IN NIJINSKA'S LES NOCES - for DANCE CHRONICLE that might help make clear Stravinsky's intentions.

"Stravinsky culled the text for "Les Noces" from a famous collection of Russian folk poetry, the "Sobranniye Piesni" of Kireievsky, and arranged his selections in a rather unorthodox manner. In comparing this text with James Joyce's "Ulysses", Stravinsky evinces his fascination with the theme of the unconscious. "Les Noces" he told Robert Craft, "might be compared to one of those scenes in "Ulysses" in which the reader seems to be overhearing scraps of conversation without the connecting thread of discourse." The key words are "without the connecting thread of discourse." Stravinsky did not obey the logic of chronological sequence in arranging the text for "Les Noces", but rather imitated the disjointed nature of the internal, psychological reality. The stylization of the text hints at the existence of the irrational world within.

Associated with this disconnected text is the separation of the singers from the characters their voices represent. In Stravinsky's words, "Individual roles do not exist in "Les Noces", but only solo voices that impersonate now one type of character and now another. Thus the soprano in the first scene is not the bride, but merely a bride's voice.... the fiance's words are sung by a tenor in the grooming scene, but by a bass at the end..."

This separation of voices and characters recalls the practice of some Symbolist directors, who used the device to draw attention away from the concrete reality of a drama and to suggest the mystical, inner world that was its object. Stravinsky's goal must have been similar - to point to the existence of the unseen or irrational by disassembling the spectacle into its constiuent parts".

I saw D'Amboise perform his "Thais" with Melissa Hayden as part of a program called "Ballet Spectacular" in the early 1970s, in Miami.