Kathleen O'Connell

Yes, sexual harassment is universal. That being said, a minimum-wage service worker who depends on her job to put food on the table, who has few other employment options, and, who simply can't risk reprisal if she complains about a manager, or a customer, or a colleague is more vulnerable than a white, well-educated professional woman with sufficient personal, professional, social, and material resources to ensure that she has the kind of harassment-free workplace we all deserve. No one should have to "cope" with harassment of any kind, nor should they be expected to give up their job or their aspirations if they can't, or choose not to. And I can assure you that workplace sexual harassment isn't any better than being groped by a stranger on the bus. ETA: I won't strike it now, but I think using the term "white" wasn't a good choice. There are plenty of white service workers who also endure harassment, and plenty of well off women of color who do as well. I was thinking of my own privilege as a white woman when I wrote that.

It doesn't matter if they were nobodies. No one should have to endure unwanted sexual attention at any time, ever. Unfortunately, it's the least advantaged and least powerful among us who have to endure harassment of every kind with little hope of redress.

Here's the thing: it seems clear from the linked article that everyone—including presumably powerful men like opera administrators and conductors—knew what was going on and knew it was having a deleterious effect on the health, well-being, personal, and professional lives of the women involved and yet none of them appears to have done anything to stop it. At the very least you'd think one of Domingo's friends might have intervened for the sake of him and his family, if not his reputation. Honestly, I'm just about as dismayed by their behavior as his.

Oh it's worse than that. Any number of people would have happily believed that Domingo had gotten "handsy" (if not worse) with his accusers. They just wouldn't have cared very much, if at all. Back in the day I had more than one person explain to me that that kind of behavior should be taken as a compliment.

Domingo: “Still, it is painful to hear that I may have upset anyone or made them feel uncomfortable — no matter how long ago and despite my best intentions. I believed that all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual. People who know me or who have worked with me know that I am not someone who would intentionally harm, offend, or embarrass anyone. “However, I recognize that the rules and standards by which we are — and should be — measured against today are very different than they were in the past. I am blessed and privileged to have had a more than 50-year career in opera and will hold myself to the highest standards.” What is it with these people? The thinking must go something like this: She didn't throw her drink in my face, so it must have been consensual! You can't judge me if she didn't protest. Back in the day you could put your hand on a woman's knee during a business lunch or plant a big kiss right on her lips and still be considered a gentleman, but gosh the rules are just different now. You can't judge me if I thought I was obeying the rules. These lame protestations-cum-fauxpologies are driving me around the bend. Just own up to it, apologize, and tell your bretheren to cut it out too while you're at it.

Seriously. Hurry back, but please, not a moment too soon.

I'm going to respectfully push back just a little re WP vs NYT on national news. The WP has spent the last couple of years hiring a boatload of talent away from other news organizations and it shows. (Especially when it comes to national security reporting.) I happen to subscribe to both papers, but I'd hardly feel under-informed if I only subscribed to the Post. I suspect that the NYT has a broader reach when it comes to global news, however - I don't know if the WP has as many overseas desks or has been able to staff them as fully as the NYT. The NYT is indeed more robust on the arts and still produces a stand-alone book review. (Given that Jeff Bezos owns both the WP and a majority stake in Amazon, you'd think he'd bestow one on the WP just to hawk more books. At one point he was musing very publicly about what to do with all his money, and I wanted to stand on my desk and shout: buy and fully fund local newspapers, Jeff!)

I think you have to be a Prime member to get the WP for $3.99. You get full access to the paper, and the iPad app is very good (much better than the NYT's imho). Even if you're not a Prime member, you can still get the WP for $5.99/month if you subscribe through Amazon.

That is gorgeous. Thanks for posting the link! I'd like for someone to get around to performing this a few more times in NYC. (Ahem, like at ABT's fall season ...)

I cosign the WP at $3.99/month. The reporting is indeed excellent and well worth the price of a foamy caffeinated beverage at your local coffeeshop. Also, a PSA for your local library, which may well make digital media available to you if you have a library card. My NYPL library card gives me access to a ton of digital media via both my desktop browser (the very one I'm using right now) and apps on my phone and tablet. The New York Times doesn't make itself as easy to acquire via public resources as say, The Washington Post, the LA Times, USA Today, or any number of magazines and journals (including The New Yorker if you want to see what Jennifer Homans is up to, which isn't much), but NYPL cardholders can access a database of text-only versions of all of the articles the NYT has published since 1980, including the ones it published this morning. It's not the best way to peruse the paper as part of your morning read, but the database's search engine is excellent and it is a dandy tool for research. The NYPL is admittedly a powerhouse version of a local library, but one shouldn't assume that one's own hometown library doesn't make these resources available to cardholders - especially if it's plugged into a state-wide or regional library network. Lots of digital educational tools — e.g., Mango Languages, Lynda.com, Naxos Music Library, Oxford Reference Online, etc — have portals designed for public & academic libraries. Really, take a look at what your local public library has to offer — you might be pleasantly surprised at how much is there.

This lovely appreciation of the great Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy is Exhibit 1. Dip into her dance writing at The New Yorker, DanceTabs, The New York Times, and WNYC to get a sense of her range. PS - Go see Bijayini Satpathy if you can! She is magnificent. (She's the dancer on the right in the linked video.)

If it's any consolation, I believe that's 30% off of the face value of a non-subscription ticket, which costs about 15% more than a subscription ticket does for the same seat. But still ...

Oh, you have every right to be skeptical! ABT's choice of which Balanchine ballets to dance and which dancers to cast in them is not unerring, to put it politely. I'm actually feeling more positive about ABT than I have in a long while. I think a decade of Ratmansky has given them the makings of a company style; there is some up-and-coming talent that I find worth watching; and finally, I like that they're relying less and less on airlifted in talent. I'm cautiously hopeful and willing to be patient. I wish they could find a more congenial NYC home than the Met, though.

I suppose it depends on who's cast as his muses. I always think Cornejo is too short for a role until I see him dance it; then I stop thinking about his height at all. Peter Boal was the shortest Apollo I can recall seeing dance Apollo live. (was Baryshinikov taller than Boal?) In my mind's eye, Apollo is a tall (or at least tall-ish) role, but it's also a porous one that's suited dancers of wildly divergent types. Boal and Hübbe, for instance.

Well, you would certainly have every right not to buy tickets for programs with Balanchine on them. And although I'd like to see some Tudor, deMille, or Ashton, I'm not going to begrudge Cornejo an Apollo (if he's in fact getting one). In any event, doing more Tudor doesn't mean they can't do some Balanchine too. But they have to pick their Balanchine carefully, of course. I do think that there are some ABT dancers on the roster right now who could do justice to at least a few of the Balanchine ballets in ABT's rep if they were given the challenge of learning and performing the right roles. For instance, I think the current roster might yield a couple of creditable casts for Ballo della Regina. (It would help if ABT could bring itself to abandon the seniority system when it comes to casting. I'd be perfectly delighted with the opportunity to see what Skylar Brandt could do with Ballo. If the company needed to find something or Hee Seo to do, they could always program Ashton's A Month in the Country, which suits her gifts very nicely.) And I don't consider performing something new or unfamiliar "practice"; the best dancers deepen their artistry the more they do something. Watching that process can be its own reward.

I wonder if Peck's remaining on the roster is a function of union rules. Perhaps he'll be dancing too often to qualify as a guest. There are several soloists who only seem to dance once in blue moon, and you have to wonder why they're still on the roster. (Not that they aren't fine dancers, but whether its a function of injury, outside gigs, or uncongenial repertory, they're barely a presence.)

And the shame of it is that The Theater Formerly Known as State is the perfect venue to showcase some of their "heritage" treasures, e.g. Tudor (20 ballets in the rep) or deMille (14 ballets in the rep). Not to mention Ashton (13 ballets in the rep). I really don't have a problem with ABT tackling Balanchine. T&V is rightly in their repertory since Balanchine choreographed it for them in 1947. (NYCB didn't perform it until 1960.) As far as I'm concerned, ABT has as much right to dance Apollo as NYCB has to dance La Sylphide. Balanchine is like Bournonville at this point: a signature choreographer who needn't (and shouldn't) be the property of one company. In any event, ABT isn't going to get better at dancing Balanchine unless they, you know, actually dance Balanchine.

Per her biography, Bond began choreographing in 2010. For comparison, Justin Peck began his choreographic career in 2009. I'm not saying Bond's choreography is as strong as Peck's, or that her career matches his for buzz. luster, and opportunity, but they've been pursuing their craft for about the same length of time. She's not as new as Lauren Lovette or Gianna Reisen. I do agree that the fall season might have benefited from better programming.

Yes, that's pretty much what they do.

Oh there's plenty of dancing when Earth, Wind & Fire take the stage! (But admittedly not the calibre of choreography Cholly Atkins brought to The Temptations.) I find romance when I start to dance in Boogie Wonderland ...

Divert was the very first Balanchine ballet I saw at the theater formerly known as State w-a-a-a-a-y back in the late 70's. It holds a very special place in my heart, and I wish the company performed it more often.

Is this the passage you're referring to? (It's at about a minute and 50 seconds into the video.) ETA: Divertimento No. 15 is about the most civilized ballet there is.

I had to pitch well over a decade's worth of programs when I moved to my current digs. It hurt. (Actually, I probably didn't have to throw them out, but for some inexplicable reason I thought I did, so into the trash they went.) Anyway, I learned my lesson. I've kept everything since then, but digitized. I rip out the pages with the casting & other production information on it, trim the edges, run them through my desktop scanner, and store the resulting PDFs on one of the storage drives attached to my home network. I use a data / document management program to organize the files. (I went paperless about a decade ago and invested in the tools that would make that possible. I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap and a program called DevonThink.) It works really well: if I need to see who's been cast as Titania in every performance of Mindsummer Night's Dream I've attended since way back when, I can get there in about four mouse clicks. Using a cell phone is a reasonable alternative if you don't have a huge volume of documents to digitize, but I recommend using a scanning app rather than just the camera alone so that you can make a PDF document rather than JPEG image. Most scanning programs (including the apps you can put on your phone) do a pretty decent job at OCR (optical character recognition), which makes the resulting PDF document searchable. That way you don't have to rely on a rigorous filing scheme—you can just search for a ballet or dancer or date to pull up the document you need. I use an app called Scanner Pro for things like receipts and it does an excellent job capturing the document, straightening it out, and turning it into a searchable PDF. You could use something like Evernote, but honestly, the file system on your computer or Google Drive would probably work just as well if you're working with searchable PDFs.

There's one reason the score ought to live on: a lot of Bernstein's devices are very useful for teaching some of the thornier bits of music theory. Want to explain what a hemiola is? Just sing "I Want to Be in America" while you clap out the eighth notes. Need an example of a tritone and its resolution? Sing "Maria." In all seriousness, it's a great score. The book and the lyrics, maybe not so much.

Belgium suffers from many of the same ethnic, socioenomic, and urban/suburban tensions that the USA does. West Side Story's form—the Broadway Musical—is quintessentially American, but I'm going to guess that the basic contours of its story resonates pretty strongly with the current production's Belgian team. Romeo and Juliet maps on to any number of internecine conflicts for a reason: it's an old, old story. West Side Story is pretty much historical fiction at this point: Hell's Kitchen has been gentrified, the gangs have relocated, and the fault lines have shifted. Personally, I think we need to be done with romanticizing and prettying up gang violence and organized crime in general. ETA: This doesn't mean that the current production team won't make a hash out of West Side Story. Broadway musicals have their own idiom, and it's one that not easy for someone from another tradition to speak with authority.