Anthony_NYC

There's a substantial excerpt in The New Criterion.

Anthem has pushed back the publication date to September 2024.

On 9/28/2010 at 1:16 PM, rg said:

the maddening aspect of both the first publication and the later reprint is that neither includes an index.

maddening not be able to dip into Johnston's writings for specific subjects.

As a workaround, with a free account you can borrow it on the Internet Archive, which offers full-text searching. 

9 hours ago, dirac said:

Well, she was young and in love. While Felicia was obviously more sophisticated and better prepared for life with a gay man than many women of that era (Rachel Kempson, for example, thought that Michael Redgrave could be cured by the love of a good woman), I thought one of the better aspects of "Maestro" was that it demonstrated how you can enter a marriage or long-term relationship ostensibly knowing what you're "in for" and still be unable to protect yourself from hurt and loneliness, particularly if you feel with a certain amount of justice that the other party isn't keeping up his end of the bargain. (You can't even say you were deceived.:))  As Jamie has said, her mother married a "tsunami."

Well, maybe a little self-deceived.

As for Cothran’s relationship with Bernstein, it seems to me Cooper would have had to invent most of the details in order to tell that story. 

31 minutes ago, Dale said:

Yup. Same. From Helene's experience, I figured somebody forwards it by hand, so I waited until business hours the next day. When I didn't receive anything, I emailed. But never heard back. I'll try to track it down next week if it doesn't come. 

Same thing happened to me. Check your junk mail folder. That’s where mine was. 

Still listed for March of this year, which is good. But it’s in two volumes, each of which will cost $250, or a dollar a page. Or did whoever typed in the information for Anthem just erroneously plug in “250” everywhere?

Oh boy! “This issue of Dance Index is devoted to a series of relatively brief passages culled from a manuscript about George Balanchine that Arlene Croce has been working on for many years.”

The issue is called “Arlene Croce on George Balanchine,” and you can buy the issue here 

On 7/19/2023 at 2:37 PM, nysusan said:

Advance sale for subscribers starts next week on 7/27. Thats for the 23/24 season and 23 Nutcracker so they will have to have the 23 Nutcracker schedule by then, I don't know when tickets go on sale to the general public.

Thank you! Just what I needed to know.  

There is still nothing on the NYCB website or in their brochures about Nutcracker for December 2023. Does anybody know when the schedule will be announced and single tickets are likely to go on sale?

On 6/28/2023 at 12:17 AM, MoMo said:

No. It was always on the schedule that she would just do the first few performances. Then to regular ABT conductors. I saw Ormsby Wilkins conduct in Orange County. 

Thanks for the information. 

I’d thought Alondra de la Parra was supposed to conduct all performances of LWFC. Does anybody happen to know why she was out tonight?

Acocella in her NYRB review makes a great observation:

“Some people proposed that perhaps Balanchine had special interests. In his 1957 Agon, he was one of the first ballet choreographers to use fully spread female legs—en face, or seen from the front (and covered, needless to say). Many choreographers have since used this maneuver. (What would Karole Armitage have been without the crotch?) God bless him, many of us thought. There it all is, the whole story of the female body, and unashamed—indeed with the pelvis featured, to show that it is the engine of movement. Men can't do this. Only women can. (Women give birth and therefore they have to be able to spread their legs.) It seemed that we were at last seeing the full extent of what female dancers could do, as design and suggestion.”

(Acocella might have added that Balanchine gave us the spread legs as early as 1928’s “Apollo”—in an actual birth scene. There is also the famous head-through-the-crotch move in “Prodigal Son” that still raises a murmur from the audience almost a century later.)

Personally, I think Acocella is right to single out Homans’s addressing of Balanchine’s emotional and sensual life as perhaps her most significant contribution. The book genuinely gave me a new perspective on an artist I thought I knew well already. I’m still turning it over in my mind and looking at his ballets again with a different perspective. Homans’s writing style is occasionally a little ponderous, and I agree with those who find her descriptions of individual ballets less enlightening than other elements in her biography. (Her description of “Diamonds” is positively Cubist—things don’t happen in the order she gives them, and even the music is identified incorrectly. Very puzzling.) But I was glad to have a great big, long, loving book to get lost in about an artist who is so dear to me, and I plan to reread it in the near future. 

There's an interview with Jennifer Homans in The Nation.

Not much information on the publisher’s site. It says “edited by” Wiley, not written by. Are individual chapters by different authors?

"The northwest corner of West 64th Street and Columbus Avenue will soon bear the name of Jacques d’Amboise, the National Dance Institute founder who passed away on May 2, 2021."

https://ilovetheupperwestside.com/two-upper-west-side-streets-to-be-renamed/

Macaulay makes excellent points:

• Scarlett died by suicide: speculation.
• If it was suicide, the Danes' cancelling of his ballet was the immediate cause: speculation.
• Nor do we know the specifics of why Scarlett was dismissed from the Royal Ballet.

People are free to speculate, of course; and sometimes it might be educational to do so. But I know from personal experience how quickly gossip turns speculation into "facts," and I know all about the harsh judgement that follows.

Are there any dancers in the cast we might know? I’ll watch it if so, even it’s bad.

Not to make too much of it (I'm not sure how important it is), but there are a lot of "tells" that the production is not by New Yorkers. One of the oddest is that the videos show streets that are not even in Manhattan. There's one long tracking shot in the Bronx. Any New Yorker immediately senses it's not the Upper West Side already, not today, not in 1957, but then as the camera creeps along you see prominent signage--more than once!--showing it to be Gerard Avenue in the Bronx. The lettering could easily have been changed on the film, and one wonders why they didn't do so.

On 3/2/2020 at 9:00 AM, nanushka said:

Thanks for the heads-up. The article is here for those interested.

And thanks right back to you. I completely forgot to include the link.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner has an interesting article on the show in The Atlantic. 

Quote

West Side Story has always been about what it means to become American. But it’s never really been about what it means to be Puerto Rican. As a Latinx musical, West Side Story is incoherent and insulting. As the mid-century fantasy of queer Jewish artists, however, it’s surprisingly compelling.

I think this is absolutely correct—it’s no  accident that four gay, Jewish artists wrote a show about the tragedy of suppressed love and racial prejudice—and wish the author had expanded on this in more detail. I also Liked this comment from Sondheim:

Quotes “were much less concerned with the sociological aspects of the story than with the theatrical ones. The ethnic warfare was merely a vehicle to tell the Romeo and Juliet story ... It might just as well have been the Hatfields and the McCoys.”

When it comes to water on stage, does anybody else remember Andriessen's “Writing to Vermeer” at the State Theater? Very striking, but I just couldn’t stop worrying about the singers’ vocal equipment. 

Now that there’s a bit of video out there for “America,” can anybody tell if it reflects the Gennaro/Robbins choreography? The PR for the movie still says that Peck is “reimagining” the original choreography, and I have no idea if that means he’s adapting it for Spielberg’s camera or replacing it all with his own steps.

Oh goody, an adaptation of Carmen, what a fresh and original idea. I haven’t seen one of those since the last ice-skating competition I watched.

Well, at least he isn’t using Bizet’s music.

On 3/21/2019 at 4:00 PM, nysusan said:

They are switching to November at the State Theater, which is why they aren't playing there now.

For any fans of Michael Trusnovec, he is retiring in June- his last performance will be in Cascade. So if you want to see him one last time better grab a ticket for one of these performances!

https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwdance/article/Paul-Taylor-Dancer-Michael-Trusnovec-Announces-Retirement-20181024

 

 

 

Ah, I hadn’t heard about the November engagement. Good news—thanks! 

On 3/12/2019 at 6:00 PM, pherank said:

I believe it was Michael Kidd. Some dirt on the production:

"Kelly asked his old friend and collaborator Stanley Donen to co-direct with him. Donen, who had just scored a major success with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (with Kidd as choreographer), did not want to go back to collaborating with Kelly, but he reluctantly agreed. The two men clashed over creative differences in the film, with Donen tending to side with Kidd against Kelly. Donen and Kelly never worked together again after this film, and their friendship ended permanently, as Donen later acknowledged."

And that's show biz.

Interesting--thanks!