Helene

It's very different for dancers who have had some voice training to do a few performances of "West Side Story Suite" anf to have te vocal stamina and excellent technique to withstand a Broadway schedule. Former ballet dancers who have performed on Broadway and have sung in those roles have a better idea of the demands. Having loved opera since before I knew what Broadway was, I've never understood why there wasn't at least an alternating cast, if not more than two casts, rotating through the run.

Here's the Pacific Northwest Ballet trailer for "Variations Serieuses" and another rehearsal video where the dancers try to keep a straight face:

That is fantastic news for OBT.

I've never seen anything funny about Ashton's stepsisters, especially when Robert Helpmann and Ashton did them. Helpmann's sister's intrinsic meanness and wish to harm and Ashton's sister's pathetic passivity always overwhelmed the rest of the ballet for me.

For those of us who don't recognize the dancers, in the bottom right corner of the video, they are identified.

PNB just tweeted: Corps dancers Emma Love & Price Suddarth will tie the knot this summer! Congrats to the happy couple! http://ow.ly/i/2B86Z Congratulations to these two lovely dancers, and wishing them a long and happy marriage

Sweet video!

Is there a difference between reviewing and criticism? Is reviewing the witnessing -- this is what happened -- but the criticism the opinion? (Not that the two can't be combined in the same piece.) I'm thinking of criticism of Macaulay for using the "I" and his own categorization. Croce and Denby didn't have to say "I," because it was understood that what they wrote was very much from their perspectives.

Balanchine's "Tarantella" isn't jokey, but it's quite jolly, and the Costermongers (middle) section of his "Union Jack" has lots of humor. The humor in Ashton's "Facade" is very British.

Thank you so much for your kind words, and welcome to Ballet Alert! We hope you'll tell us about your productions in Lima. My Peruvian friends remember their early ballet lessons in Peru fondly, and I hope you have a great and growing audience for your company. We tend to think towards Europe and forget the long history of ballet in Latin and South America.

Welcome, Iris! We're glad you found us We hope you'll post about what you see: we don't get much news about Dutch National Ballet, which some dancers we knew well have joined -- Matthew Golding, Casey Herd, Isaac Hernandez -- or Paris Opera from Paris, and we're always glad to get impressions of the Bolshoi in Europe.

Many ballet companies, including Pacific Northwest Ballet, perform Kylian's "Sechs Tanze," which has a lot of humor. The second part of "Petite Mort" has a running joke of stand-alone black dresses with paniers in the second half, and they re-appear in "Sechs Tanze." PNB did a Laugh Out Loud Festival in one of Peter Boal's early seasons Because of work travel, I missed it, but PNB has done a few of the works in rep, like Christopher Wheeldon's wicked "Variations Serieuses" and Susan Stroman's Broadway-esque "TAKE FIVE...more or less," which is being revived this coming season as part of the Director's Choice program. There are certainly many humorous moments and stock characters in the Petitpa-based "Don Quixote," although the National Ballet of Cuba's was more subdued, at least the tour version.

atm711 and a belated Happy Birthday!

Ismene Brown has related the news that Mikhail Messerer has been named Chief Ballet Master of the Mkhailovsky Theatre after "snapping up for the Mikhailovsky of one of the key players in the Bolshoi’s violent soap opera," Angelina Vorontsova, for whom he has big plans, including major roles in "The Flames of Paris." which will be danced in London opposite the Bolshoi dancing the Ratmansky version. (Edited: I misread the blog post about when and where Messerer's "The Flames of Paris" will be performed.) Blog entry The news follows a translation of an interview with Messerer in "Izvestia."

Sound Transit revised its East Link route, and PNB's East Side school in Bellevue is in the path of the new route, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. http://www.bellevuereporter.com/news/215135421.html According to the article, the two identified solutions mean either the demolition of the building, which PNB prefers, or a set of modifications to the existing building. I hope the company either gets the option they want or Sound Transit finds a reason to re-revise the routing. The Francia Russell Center reaches a population for whom it would be impractical to commute to Seattle, and at least two PNB dancers have come through the ranks to join the company.

Royal Winnipeg is bringing Rudi van Dantzig's "Romeo and Juliet" to ballet-starved Vancouver in 2014 for its Western Tour, and I found a couple of clips on YouTube, including this version of the Balcony Pas de Deux with Marieke Simons: I guess there's a guy in it, too, but I didn't really notice, because I couldn't keep my eyes off of her. I noticed that there's a difference in that version, which I think is a studio version -- I didn't hear applause -- from this live version with Larissa Lezhnina and Altin Kaftira: a little after the 4.5-minute mark, in the Lezhnina version, the Nurse makes an actual appearance, while in the Simons version, it looks like in the second jump to his shoulder Juliet spies someone through the curtain and tries to send him away before changing her mind. I like that version better, but I suspect if it was a studio version, it might have been adjusted, the way Rodolfo's "Si" in the middle of "Mi chiamano Mimi" is often cut in solo aria albums. Not surprisingly, most of the clips are either promo montages or of the Balcony PDD, with the exception of a 2-minute clip of the PDD with Paris. Has anyone seen this version? Does it hold up for 2+ hours?

Yes it is SFB's 80th anniversary season, which you'd think would be highlighted somewhere on SFB's home page, but I found it in the site's tiny type at the top of this page: http://www.sfballet.org/tickets