Helene

PNB has published the first weekend's casting for the program that opens a week from Friday: Rep 4 performance casting week 1.xls When the website is updated, casting will appear here: http://www.pnb.org/S...Details-Casting Since there's are few differences, I'll post it here: A Million Kisses to My Skin (Dawson) KORBES ORZA DEC POSTLEWAITE CHAPMAN PORRETTA RICARD ORZA GILBREATH RAUSCH Cylindrical Shadows (Lopez Ochoa) NAKAMURA (Fri, Sat eve.)/DEC (Sun mat.) KITCHENS GILBREATH POSTLEWAITE (Fri, Sat eve.)/CRUZ (Sun mat.) BARTEE TISSERAND SUDDARTH THOMSON HIPOLITO JR. Mating Theory (Quijada) IMLER FOSTER DEC MULLIN O'CONNOR POSTLEWAITE LIN-YEE BARTEE THOMSON SUDDARTH I think the role that Chalnessa Eames danced in the premiere/original version of "Cylindrical Shadows" is a great one. I hope people will report on how Nakamura and Dec approach the role. I won't be able to see it until second weekend; For those with matinee subscriptions, please note that the Sunday matinee is first weekend (18 Mar), and the Saturday matinee is second weekend (24 Mar).

I think his roots might be more in the second section of the last Beethoven piano sonata.

A couple of notes: The audience treated the Orphee and Eurydice ascent from Hades scene much more seriously Sunday afternoon. Maybe there was more drinking at the Saturday night pre-opera dinners. Because Gluck pointed to Wagner in his dramatic and musical approach, it was fun to see Amor handing out golden apples to the crowd.

"The Steadfast Tin Soldier" was filmed for the Dance in America "Choreography by Balanchine" series with McBride and Baryshnikov) and is available on DVD with "Chaconne" (Farrell/Martins), "Prodigal Son" (Baryshnikov/von Aroldingon), "Ballo della Regina" (Ashley/Weiss),"Elegie" from "Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3" (von Aroldingen/Lavery), and "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux" (also McBride/Baryshnikov). It has the virtue of being short. I think it plays best with young dancers.

I had this exact experience w/ Tom Cruise in 1990. I saw him up close and the experience was . . . a disappointment. In real life, he was shorter and plainer than I had expected -- he was lacking in "magic". But get him on the big screen and the camera picks up that "magic". I think so much of it has to do with the way actors carry themselves. When I was in high school, standing at the bus stop by the Museum of Natural History with a visiting friend, she nudged me and said, "Look, Tony Randall!". He looked very dapper in a suit and tie, and his carriage and movement were distinctive.

That is sick on so many levels You can almost see the thought bubbles at the end saying, "Our work here is done."

I received my copy, and it's a lovely book and story. I'm particularly taken by the illustrations by Emily Arnold McCully, who invokes the characters beautifully. (The cover photo looks like a depiction of the four young girls in "Mozartiana" with the swan overhead.) I love how McCully draws the evolution of the swan's dancing, from her early steps until she masters turnout. I feel like any more description will be a spoiler. I think this would be a great present for a child of any age interested in ballet.

Jack Anderson's obituary for her in The New York Times is entitled, "Barbara Fallis, City Ballet Soloist And a Dance Teacher, Dies at 56; Joined Alonso Ballet in Havana Opened Own Studio". Being the NYT, one of the first things they note is that she was actor/director Richard Thomas' ("The Waltons") mother. The full obituary is under the NYT "paid" scheme.

I've been reading about Lavinia Moore on the Opera-L list. (I was on a bus to Seattle during the broadcast.) It's always exciting to hear about a great last-minute debut under pressure. Moore is only 33; in singer years, though, that's a big difference in experience. (Moore had already sung major roles in European opera houses.) Friday and Sunday audiences at Seattle Opera usually hear the alternate cast. (It looks like they've stopped describing it as the "silver" cast, and "gold" is now the "opening" cast, usually changing the top principals only.) It's a rare production at SO where the Friday/Sunday audiences get to hear the generally more experienced cast. Usually it's during the summer production, if there's no "Ring" scheduled, and, occasionally, when they give six instead of eight performances, there is a single scheduled cast, like in "Orphee et Eurydice". (For "Atilla", there were six performances, but an alternate cast for the single Sunday matinee.) Here, there was a lot of disappointment at hearing that Burden would not be singing -- I heard a lot of it in the lobbies before the opera and at intermission, although by intermission, the comments were mostly "I'm disappointed to have missed Burden, but this guy is good!" -- which, if Stenson been cast originally, would not have been the case. Burden is still one of my favorite current tenors, if not my favorite, in the non-Wagner rep, and I'm sorry he was hurt. I'm not sorry to have heard Stenson, though, not one bit, but, of course, I got to hear Burden on Saturday night, as did the broadcast audience. I'm a big fan of the alternate casts. Sometimes, it's because there are singers that Jenkins loves and puts in the opening casts and who aren't my favorites, and I prefer the alternate cast singers. Once in a while, between the time the alternate cast singers are hired and when they sing, they have great success elsewhere in the world, and they become the attraction. Most often, it's a great chance to hear generally younger North American singers, many of whom have been trained in the great developing artists programs and who have wonderful acting skills and ensemble ability, or young European singers who've sung in rep companies in Europe and often make their North American or US debut with the company, like the fine Atilla, Kares. I try to see at least one of each, and I'm lucky that there are back-to-back Saturday night/Sunday matinee performances that I can hear on a weekend trip. Speight Jenkins, who looks at these things long-term, said in the Q&A that Seattle Opera may have struck tenor gold twice, first with Lawrence Brownlee -- another of my favorite tenors - and now with Stenson, but, having decades of experience in seeing the arcs of careers, stated this in the conditional. One of my operatic joys was hearing Brownlee young and listening to his voice strengthen and grow, in his case retaining its agility and gleam, with his great underlying technique. A similar experience for New York City Opera goers was hearing Samuel Ramey's voice mature from his 30's to his mid-50's. Stenson isn't close to his prime, but what was most striking to me was having such style in addition to technique. It's a long road to a career, but starting with a role in a version that isn't produced much because there are few tenors who can sing it, and performing it so beautifully, is a great start, and I'll happily follow his career. It was contemporary, but almost Paul Taylor/Mark Morris contemporary. Orphee was costumed in a kind of Indian-style white hippie wear, although he wore shoes, not sandals. (No leather jackets here.) Outside of the Hades scene, the chorus and males dancers were dressed in a similar style, but in a range of light blue to aqua or turquoise or medium blues, with the women in matching colors in loose, long dresses. The dance women's dresses were in similar colors, but they were sleeveless, more fitted at the waist, and cut below the knee, a lot like the dresses in "Esplanade". I thought the sets and costumes were lovely. Someone at the Q&A yesterday said the Elysian Fields/final scene set reminded them of the Windows desktop background, which is so true! That might not have played well in Apple and Google lands, but it worked very well in Seattle.

Here's the blog entry that was linked to the Facebook announcement: http://www.seattleop...-at-todays.html The short version: Oh, my, lordy, the boy can sing, wow, wow, wow. I can't believe he's in his 20's. I was trying to be ecological and brought back my "Orphee" program from yesterday and missed the insert announcing Stenson's appearance this afternoon, and I had already left when the Facebook notice was posted. Speight Jenkins made a pre-curtain speech, and said that William Burden had sprained his ankle badly last night, and was told by his doctors to stay off of it for a couple of days. He should be fine by Wednesday, and Jenkins elaborated a bit in the Q&A after the performance, where the first 1/3 of the Q&A was about Stenson. From where I was sitting last night, it looked like Burden tripped and caught himself near the end of the final scene. Jenkins said that from the radio booth, he could see that Burden turned on his ankle. I guess adrenaline kicked in, because he wasn't limping for the rest of the act or the curtain calls, but in his dressing room, he told Jenkins that his ankle was swollen. By this morning it was really swollen, and after seeing a doctor, he was told to ice and elevate it for 36 hours. Burden was willing to sing today, but Jenkins said that because the opera is so focused on the three characters, it wasn't a candidate for one singer to sing from the side while his cover lip-synched and acted the part, and there was no reason for Burden to go on stage in pain. According to Jenkins, as a cover, Stenson was given rehearsal time, including one-on-one time with the Assistant Stage Director, and he did the piano tech and final dress rehearsal. Stenson looked wonderfully prepared, and he's alone onstage or separated physically from Eurydice; I can't imagine there was much collegial whispering going on. I don't know if he's taken movement classes or has a dance background apart from the standard young artist kind of training, but he moved very well, and his acting was very focused and confident, especially in the difficult scene in Hades, where the Furies dance around him to a longish orchestral part, and he has to hold the magic lyre to defend himself. Jenkins said that he couldn't wait to get onstage, and that he knew that he would sing the way he did. It was an entirely confident performance, different from Burden's. His voice isn't quite as big -- he's a lot younger -- but it has a beautiful tone, and in styling, pacing, and phrasing, apart from his impassioned and more operatic rendition of "J'ai perdu mon Eurydice", it was a like hearing a mature oratorio singer. I remember once that George Jellinek did a program on "The Vocal Scene" where he described different vocal effects, and Stenson gave a class in it, all sung with beautiful breath control. I recognized Stenson's name and knew I had seen him in a small role -- I thought, perhaps, from "La Traviata" -- but he was Arturo in "Lucia di Lammermoor" last year, so he'd performed with Davinia Rodriguez before. There was an extra ardency in her voice today, and when the curtain came down, there was a roar of cheers and applause from behind the curtain, the type that can be heard after the final performance of "Die Gotterdammerung". To say it was well-deserved is an understatement, and it was great to hear the company cheering one of its own. If I had children, I'd be storing this up as one to tell the grandchildren.

Tonight I saw a performance of Gluck's 1774 French version of "Orphee et Eurydice", sans the opera-ending ballet music. All of the designers were "in-house": Costume Designer Heidi Zamora, making her main stage debut, although she has designed for the Young Artists Program and specific costumes for SO productions, Lighting Designer Connie Yun, who made her SO debut in "Die Fledermaus", and Set Designer Phillip Lienau, also in a debut. The sets and costumes were relatively plain: the Elysian Fields had a sculptural tree mid-to-downstage right extending 2/3 across the stage, and there was a small, grassy hill leading upstage, used effectively by Director Jose Maria Condemi (chorus) and choreographer Yannis Adouniou (seven dancers). Except for Eurydice's flowing Greek dress, the chorus and Orphee's costumes could have fit into a Mark Morris production, with Amor in a tiered reddish-orange dress with big gold wings and knee-high gold boots to match the gold bicycle, her preferred method of transportation. Conductor Gary Thor Wedow had made his debut with SO in another great Gluck score, "Iphigenie en Tauride", and under him, the orchestra played with the same underlying drama, urgency, and clarity as they did in "Iphigenie". General Director Speight Jenkins explained in the program notes that Gluck was writing "reform opera" when he composed the first version in Italian, to right opera back on the course when it was devised in the 17th century from what he called the "canary contest" school of opera, but in the Q&A, he called it "reform opera that is forward-looking", noting its musical continuity and marriage of text/drama and music. He noted that Gluck revised and extended the opera when he received a commission in Paris from Marie Antoinette, a former pupil when she was reared in Vienna, adding dance music that was a requirement in Paris, but also fortifying the orchestra for the superior Paris orchestras, re-writing Orpheus as a tenor -- originally a castrato -- and adding a tour de force aria for Orphee before he descends into Hades. (This aria is full of runs and trills.) While the dancers often blended into the chorus, there were several notable times when they didn't. The first was in the scene in Hades, where as Furies, wearing stretchy tubes over their arms and upper bodies ending in hoods, , surrounded Orphee to prevent him from entering the underworld. By stretching the tubes with their arms and head, their undulating movements were eerie and threatening. In the Elysian Fields scene, they were striking when they slid down the hill -- they would have made Paul Taylor proud -- and after the "Dance of the Blessed spirits", two couples danced the instructions from the gods that Orphee could neither look at Eurydice until they returned (to the Earth's surface) nor explain why he couldn't look at her, through the consequences if Orphee disobeyed. If there was one directorial miss, it was overestimating the intelligence of the audience and following the tone of the music, by having Eurydice calmly follow Orphee out of the Elysian Fields (end Act I, as performed here) and into the beginning of Act II. Her transformation into a doubting wife looked sudden, and her declarations that he didn't love her were met by "knowing" laughter in the audience. (Some laughed longer than others, like the grown-up woman next to me who also commented throughout and started to sing out of tune when she recognized the lead-in to the opera's only non-"Chaconne" greatest hit.) Not that Davinia Rodriguez, the Eurydice didn't try: she is a beautiful singing actress. She doesn't have very much to sing compared to Orphee, and most of what she does is an extended version of "Ach, Ich full's", which is thankless dramatically, especially when the audience is laughing as if watching Erica Kane in another diva-like snit. She sounded a little strained, unlike her Lucia last year, but just a little, and her voice blended beautifully with William Burden's in the great last act extended duet. Burden, for whom Jenkins staged the opera, was the undisputed star, dramatically and vocally, with extraordinary breath control in the long phrases, and focused, golden tone. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful ensemble effort from all three singers, including Julianne Gearhart's high-spirited Amor, the chorus, the dancers, and the musicians. Burden, Rodriguez, and Gearhart sing all six performances, including tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday night, and next Saturday night. This is definitely worth seeing and hearing. The live broadcast was tonight; the Q&A with Jenkins can be downloaded from the KING-FM site (www.king.org).

Thank you so much for describing the production and giving us your impressions, jsmu! We rarely get to hear about this major company.

"First Position" won the Audience Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best New Director at the Portland International Film Festival: http://newsroom.nwfilm.org/2012/02/28/piff-35-alaska-airlines-audience-award-winners/

"man who would not move"... (I think I hear humming, so that must be Gould.)

The University of Washington just announced its 2012-13 World Series-Dance season; I received an email with the info: Paul Taylor Dance Company Thursday-Saturday, October 4-6, 2012, 8pm Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet Thursday-Saturday, November 15-17, 2012, 8pm Compagnie Marie ChouinardThursday-Saturday, January 24-26, 2013, 8pm Black GraceThursday-Saturday, February 21-23, 2013, 8pm Trey McIntyre ProjectThursday-Saturday, April 11-13, 2013, 8pm Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte CarloThursday-Saturday, May 16-18, 2013, 8pm

And here are the bloopers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKrSrh1Ih6U

Here's the latest to be posted: "A Day in the Life of a Dancer" featuring Jerome Tisserand: A lot of the rehearsal video is from "Don Q", with Lesley Rausch as Kitri to Tisserand's Basilio.

That's the list of potentially active repertory. I'm not sure why works drop off the list apart from the obvious -- Maillot's "Romeo et Juliette" replaced Stowell's "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" and the Ratmansky "Don Q" replaced the ABT production -- but some may have to do with rights. (For example, now that there's a Robbins Foundation controlling stagings, I'm not sure PNB has permission to perform "The Cage".) What sandik is asking for is a list of works that PNB has performed that have been removed from this list, like "The Cage", Tetley's "Rite of Spring", and Tudor's "Dark Elegies", which I saw the company perform.

They will not allow themselves to be beaten by Steeler Nation!

That's pretty exciting casting: Peter Martins did something similar when he cast his Romeo + Juliet.

I have my hate-hate relationship with guest artists, because there are so few performances (seven for each regular rep), that unless it's for a ballet that needs more people than the company has, it means fewer performances for company members. Robbins' "The Cage" is one the company could do so well: it's a shame it's not in the rep. (It would have been great to see it last season, right before "Giselle".) It was Jonathan Porretta's amazing performances in Glen Tetley's "Rite of Spring" that convinced The Powers That Be to find the money to give him a well-deserved promotion. For people who like to renew early, online renewals have been enabled on the PNB website: http://www.pnb.org/Season/Subscriptions/Renew/Overview.aspx If you log in (at the top of the page), your renewal info will appear on screen after you click "Online".

Davy Jones of "The Monkees" fame, died today of a heart attack at age 66: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20574693,00.html My inner 5th-grader mourns him.

Many here will remember Christopher Flemming from his New York City Ballet days. His company will perform his choreography for "The Myth and Madness of Edgar Allen Poe" next weekend, March 9-10, at the Mandell Theatre (Drexel University) in Philadelphia. Friday, March 9, 8pm Saturday, March 10, 2pm and 7pm http://www.balletfleming.org/Home.html Here's an excerpt: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFGuWD4Ynds

I just received the first subscriber announcement about the 2012-13 season: Fifteen seconds later, and I'm already casting these few tidbits in my mind.

Mr. Levy will bring the pretty, but Urkel is sure looking fine as a grown-up. I hope he moves as well now.