Helene

That reminds me if a story I heard attributed to boxing champion James Johnson. Johnson was caught speeding, and the judge fined him $100. He wrote a check for $200, and when asked why, replied "That's for the way back."

Just got a heads up that there were a number of casting changes; newly cast dancers are in red: Nutcracker 2-11 December v. Dec 1.xlsx

Here's a spreadsheet with casting from 2-11 December; as always casting is subject to change: Nutcracker 2-11 December.xlsx

The newest video features Chelsea Adomaitis on the role of Peacock, and she reveals the costume secret of the tail: In rehearsal, I think that's Emma Love learning behind her, and it looks like a few shots of Laura Gilbreath helping her with her makeup. Edited to add: Casting is up for the next two weekends: http://www.pnb.org/Season/11-12/Nutcracker/#Details-Casting Lots of great Peacocks to see: Adomaitis, Love, Dec, Gilbreath, Anspach, Reid, Kitchens, Chapman, and O'Connor.

Sounds wonderful. I thought Maria Chapman was radiant as Aurora in "Aurora's Wedding" earlier in the month, but I couldn't help an internal giggle, as she was the most sophisticated of the Countesses earlier in her career. I can still see her standing downstage during the Blindfold Dance, watching the Prince across the stage, and tapping her riding crop in her palm. Still no casting up for this weekend. I'm hoping to catch one, in between appointments and Mark Morris on Saturday night.

With the upgrade, we've had to move the amazon.com ordering box to the bottom of each page. We hope you'll think of us when ordering from amazon.com, especially during the holiday season.

The impotence of someone at the top of his game in many ways, but insecure in the face of a sea change, and completely unable to influence, let alone control, Monroe in any way, let alone get her into bed, even after Arthur Miller left the set. I'm not sure if the age issue was in Clark's book, which I haven't read, or was created for the film, but it was emphasized in the film. May be true biographically, but it wasn't what the movie was going for and then shot itself in the foot by undermining its own point. Serious students of all kinds have used the wrong technique for given roles, and the conflict between this particular technique and her preternatural presence on camera was part of this movie. There was no insinuation in the movie: it was a direct accusation of her entire entourage, not just Greene, who was played like a gangster cartoon by Dominic Cooper. That included Arthur Jacobs, played by Toby Smith, and Stasberg, played by Wannamaker. The blanket accusation puts a different light on Stasberg in a scene where a doctor is called in and asks who is in charge, and Strasberg says that she is. It questions whether she was complicit, where an accusation against Greene would have made her look protective. Given the descriptions by Tamara Tchinarova Finch of how Leigh's friends pretended nothing was wrong as they witnessed Leigh in the full throes of her illness just a few years before "Prince and the Showgirl" was made, it's very hard to know whether her illness was forefront at any other time in her life. I don't think Leigh should have been portrayed at the same level of disturbed as Monroe, but a few more tone changes and expressions throughout the movie, instead of portraying her as Nora Charles would have shed light on Olivier's taste in women who brought emotional drama through more than a heightened temperament. It does seem like the token highbrow entry into the Oscar race, yes.

Very sad news. Rest in piece, Ms. Vodehnal.

This was the real center of the movie, although I think they created a real diversion with the assertion that Monroe's entourage kept her doped up because she was their cash cow, without following it through. That made Strasberg look like a quack, in her hovering, suffocating presence as she almost laughably shoved method acting down Monroe's throat as if "The Prince and the Showgirl" were "Rebel without a Cause" instead of a a stock theater piece transferred to film. From a character point of view, it was interesting because Wannamaker portrayed Strasberg as a controlling mother who had drunk the kool-aid, but the accusation of exploitative quackery hovered and distracted from the conflict of style.

If anyone is interested in the soundtrack to the movie, World Champion Pairs skaters Aliona Savchenko/Robin Szolkowy are skating to it this year for the Free Skate. Their latest competition, Cup of Russia, was the best performance of the year so far:

A friend and I went to see "My Week with Marilyn" this afternoon, the film based on filmmaker Colin Clark's memoir. Clark, the son of a upper, wealthy parents who weren't very keen on their son going into the movie profession, he wormed his way into the production of the film "The Prince and the Showgirl", starring Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, as Olivier's 3rd Assistant Director. I thought Branaugh was amazing as Olivier, a lauded actor facing midlife professional and sexual crises, conveying impotence without whiny self-pity. I was gobsmacked by the way his normal speech would morph into unselfconscious and perfectly conversational lines from Shakespeare. While Michelle Williams, who played Monroe, doesn't have the icon's fullness or richness, I thought she did a wonderful job of conveying, quite subtly and like-ably, an emotional landscape and appeal. There was no in-your-face pounding like in Cotillard's portrayal of Piaf, but the danger she posed was just as palpable. Julia Ormond portrayed Vivien Leigh, Olivier's wife at the time, and the lead in the stage production on which the movie script was based, as a sophisticate. Having declared bluntly that Olivier wanted to make the film because he had fallen in love with Monroe in New York and wanted to have an affair with her, she played the knowing wife about to be discarded because of her age, just as Olivier deemed her too old to play the role in the film. (There is a good smattering of bluntness in this movie.) It wasn't until the end of the movie that she showed any inkling of the bi-polar illness that would have made an interesting parallel to Monroe in the movie, and even in that scene, she was more like Fricka to Olivier's Wotan. An opportunity missed. Eddie Redmayne played the young Clark as a little bit more interesting than the standard naive young man who overestimated his own sophistication, but there was too much of the standard Hollywood face brightening and puppy energy. He is, though, beautiful to look at -- I'm a sucker for freckles, and it's time to find that "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in which I'm sure he brought the pretty to Angel Clare -- and he's long, lean, and moves elegantly. Derek Jacobi did a cameo appearance as either Clark's uncle or godfather, an art historian at Windsor Castle, and I'm not sure if he was parodying the standard Hollywood portrayal of an older British man who is enchanted by the backwards, but blunt, American. The Hollywood people were vulgar stereotypes, and even Zoe Wannamaker, as Paula Strasberg, was a bit over-the-top: I kept expecting her eyes to pop through her huge glasses. Perhaps the performance in the film was Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike, who portrayed steeliness and graciousness in equal measure.

If Joseph is reading, I have a big request; is it possible to play the credits slowly enough that people can read them? It's very frustrating to try to catch a name, only to have it speed by. The Met Opera does the same thing, much to my chagrin.

I just finished reading Jane Simpson's excellent overview/review of the London and Copenhagen seasons in the Autumn 2011 issue of Dance View in which she writes about Alban Lendorf's debut as James in "La Sylphide", and it reminded me of my reaction to Hallberg's dancing, which I've seen several times live:

The Bolshoi website cast list for 20 November lists Loparevich as Carabosse, but Marina Harss in The Faster Times reviews Denis Savin in the role at the movies. (Savin played the hapless poet in "Esmeralda" brilliantly.) I want the DVD for Hallberg, Abdullin, Katpsova, and the costumes.

Oh, no, those bows can sometimes be a performance in themselves, especially without the constraints of union time.

Marcie Sillman interviewed Madeleine Devries, a Professional Division student about to begin yeoman duty, or as yeoman as the union contracts allow, in "Nutcracker" for Public Radio station KUOW: http://kuow.org/program.php?id=25167 She was trained in Seattle, but the transcript doesn't say whether she was was one of the handful of students at PNBS who tracked from the lower grades into the Professional Division. Being "invited" to the PD by Peter Boal suggests that she was, but she may have trained elsewhere in Seattle.

A new video: http://www.youtube.com/user/pacificnwballet#p/search/0/AVNNbIaTo5g

I didn't realize that was she -- then it was for Semenyaka that Hallberg did his Charles Atlas pose?

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i just realized that I hadn't mentioned Hallberg at all. I thought his dancing and demeanor just beautiful to watch, and it made me kvell. I loved how after the curtain calls, when the dancers were posing for cell phone pictures behind the curtain, he made a Charles Atlas pose.

Given the rush to get the theater done, and that the punch list isn't finished, it's not clear what was changed to get the opening back on track. I'm willing to give the set designer the benefit of the doubt on this one: the specs might not have been clear and they, and the choreographer's requirements, might have been changing as the set was being designed, and getting very fancy with set changes and using all the bells and whistles would have been risky. Frigerio may have been trying to balance the required opulence with a more of a moving target than usual. I'm not sure what the dimensions of the Bolshoi Theater are, but the Bastille is an enormous stage. I saw "Raymonda Act III" (Nureyev version) there a few years ago, and it looked like the guests hadn't show up yet, despite the number of dancers on stage. (Melancholic in "4T's" looked like he was swimming in the ocean.)

Weese said in at least one Q&A that one of the reasons she wanted to dance at PNB was that the schedule was much more humane, and that at that point in her career, she was taking her physical condition into consideration. (In addition to "Nutcracker", PNB performs six programs a year over two weekends of a total of seven performances, sometimes eight for best sellers, which was eight, possibly nine, when they came, which is about every other month.) She did spend some time out here with injury, too. There are some excellent sections of Stephen Manes' book, "Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear" that address the former NYCB dancers' decision-making and concerns. (The interviews took place in the 2007-8 seasons.) About Seth Orza, who was offered a promotion after he had decided to join PNB, but before he announced his resignation: About Carla Korbes, to whom Manes devotes a chapter, and who had more of a roller-coaster ride at NYCB that lasted her whole time in the company. In the book, she describes how Martins wanted her thin, and she'd diet, be cast in a lot of ballets, get injured because she was working so hard and "I wasn't eating". Even so, Even Boal tried to be sure that she was willing to leave the pinnacle.

As an aside, [erhaps as Tatiana Kuznetsova was http://www.nytimes.c...olshoi.html?hpw in "The New York Times", “Premier dancers of such rank have never left the Bolshoi,” wrote Tatiana Kuznetsova, the ballet critic of the daily Kommersant. “Yes, they could run abroad. But that happened in Soviet times. In modern Russia, the artists only come to the Bolshoi.”", but great dancers like Maria Kochetkova made their way West from the Bolshoi since the fall of the Soviet Union and were given their due and opportunities here. I think Ms. Koznetsova's attitude sums up the shock that the world of ballet has changed. I see that in Seattle, where Carla Korbes and Seth Orza left NYCB for a regional company like PNB. They most likely would have not had Peter Boal not taken over the company, but Boal and they could have been considered "Out of sight-out of mind" the moment they went west of Westchester county. The criticism of Mr. Kekhman sounds a bit like the criticism of Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera, who has been criticized for taking a marketing approach to a prominent arts institution. Perhaps Mr. Kehkman will enable a "Live from the Mikhailovsky" HD broadcast with Osipova and Vasiliev. Such a venture would put his company on the map globally.

Just as a gentle reminder, discussing other discussion boards if off limits here, unless, like in Mashinka's post, where former discussion board members have become professional critics, it is newsworthy.

Tsiskaridze reminds me physically of a beloved cousin -- although my cousin's hair doesn't need gel or any other help to do what NT's does -- so it's hard for me to hold a grudge for very long. When I take issue with him, it's because his idea of tradition stops at 2.5 generations back, not that this is surprising in an art form passed down across generations, and the "grandparents" are the prominent ones during schooling.