Helene

I'm really grateful for the reviews posted on these Miami City Ballet's performances. It's one of the most important companies in the US. ( for a West Coast visit from MCB)

I'm so glad you were able to get tickets, and look forward to reading your review!

It's too bad you didn't like Nagelstad. (I don't think the critics were too crazy about her either.) I thought she was one of the few Normas I've seen who was attentive to the text, a fine actress, and who sounded and acted older and more experienced than Adalgisa. She didn't have the voice of Caballe, for example, but for me it was a more satisfying performance overall, particularly since Caballe was off-pitch during Act I. Mishura is a lovely singer. She was a performance of Aida I saw a couple of years ago.

I saw Whelan dance Aurora in Martins' version of Sleeping Beauty during the Spring 1994 season, and of all the Auroras I saw at NYCB during the first seasons the ballet was presented -- Fugate, Nichols, Kistler, Margaret Tracey, and Hlinka -- with the exception of Fugate's "Vision Scene," she was by far my favorite, even at that relatively young age. She had a sensibility all of her own; she danced it as a Balanchine dancer, and if she felt the pressure of a century of precedents, she didn't show it. I would love to see Whelan's Odette/Odile.

I'm so glad you mentioned the singers and the orchestra. I've never heard anyone match Bailey's "Introduction to Valhalla" from Das Rheingold. I wish I could have heard him, Remedios, and Hunter live.

I'm not sure if this has opened in the US yet, but when I was in London, I saw Mrs. Henderson Presents, the new Stephen Frears movie starring Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. It's based on the true story of a woman who used part of her inheritance to open a theater during the WWII era; it opened with vaudeville, but when that formula was copied, introduced nude tableaus into the mix, much to the delight of the soldiers in town. Christopher Guest has a wonderful small but intermittent role as Lord Crowmer, who is in charge of enforcing decency standards for the stage. Mrs. Henderson Presents was a bit sentimental in a Hollywood way -- when did the BBC get so Merican? -- but it was Dench's movie, and well worth it.

KnightRupert, We don't allow tape trading or private sales on Ballet Talk. If anyone knows of a commercial copy that is available, either on a commercial site or auction site (eBay, etc.), please post a reply here.

It's still listed as playing at the Harvard Exit in Seattle through next week

Buddy, thank you very much for your reports. Our policy about news is that it must be official, from a company website or publication, announcement from the stage, or established news source. We don't allow news from other discussion boards or blogs, unless the blogs are from established critics, or from personal contact with dancers/dancers' family and friends. (More details can be found on this thread. But as long as your sources are official, and you tell us where you found them (link to an internet site or name/date or issue of a print publication, i.e., Dec 5. New York Times), you should be fine.

Review, Take 1: Tonight I saw Ibsen's Pillars of the Community. It had a Hollywood ending. My friends and I were sure that this could not be the real ending. Review, Take 2: Tonight I saw Ibsen's Pillars of the Community. At the end, it switched tracks from a tragic ending of Shakespearean proportions to a vision of politics and business in America during the Enron era, which is a whole lot sicker.

Thank you so much for noting this -- I just looked at the program and saw that I had missed the following: "A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera and the Lithuanian National Opera." I hope it's as much of a box office success in NY and Vilnius as it was in London. I also read that the Sellars/Viola Doctor Atomic may come to NYC. I should note that my memory is already playing tricks: the direction for the principals is patient and focused, and I had blanked out much of the silly staging for the chorus -- except the final scene, as the bomb is dropped, which was inspired -- and the mundane and dated Lucinda Childs choreography ("OK, campers, let's pretend to be radioactive debris!"), with the one exception where they embodied the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" facade of the war machine. That's exactly what some of last night's opera sounded like! Luckily, there was a sign-language translator to the side of downstage right. I don't understand sign-language, but she sort of acted the entire opera, including all parts in the ensemble. She was very graceful. Their season this year also includes The Carmelites, Xerxees, Salome, Billy Budd, The Mikado, Rigoletto, Vaughn Williams' Sir John in Love, La Belle Helene, Orfeo (co-production with Handel and Haydn Society of Boston), Makropoulos Case, Ariodante, Nixon in China, and Purcell's King Arthur (with Mark Morris Dance Group). It actually sounds like a couple of NYCO seasons combined, with a greater emphasis on texts that were written in English. Butterfly had to be translated -- Pinkerton's first act aria began, "The world is my oyster" -- and while the translations themselves by David Parry were sensitive to text and time, on the whole, operas that are written in English sound more natural to the English-speaking ear. Unlike the supertitles translators, who can give the gist of the text without regard to the music, for opera in English, the translator must take on every text-based note. Both The End of the Affair, with large sections taken from or based closely on the Graham Greene novel, and Doctor Atomic, a compilation of texts, including one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets which provided the text for a tour de force aria for Oppenheimer that ends Act I, flowed quite naturally. (It helped a great deal that Gerard Finley, Kristine Jepson, and Richard Paul Fink had superb diction.) The proposed introduction of supertitles at ENO has proven to be controversial, with commentators wondering what the purpose of opera sung in English is, if the words are projected. However, as bart pointed out, the Colisseum is a barn, and I doubt that the gaudy decorations were applied with acoustics in mind. There is a great recording of the Ring sung by ENO, called the "Gooddall Ring." All 16 hours are in English. Seattle Opera put itself on the map by producing the Ring, and the first seasons had sequential English and German versions. Opera in translation has a long history: many of the productions in the first half of the 20th century were translated into the local language (Wagner in Italian, Verdi and Massanet in German and Russian.)