YouOverThere

Serenade After Plato's Symposium is 100% pure genius. Thirteen Diversions was very enjoyable as well. Unfortunately, I only get to see them once :(.

I wonder who the pairs for R&J will be. With 6 performances, will they use 3 pairs? Brooklyn Mack seems to be paired more often recently with Eunwon Lee than with Maki Onuki (who didn't appear at all in the Nutcracker). Will Sarabia be paired with his wife?

The Humans marks the latest entry in my list of award-winning plays (2016 Tony Award for best play) that left me flat. I just don't get what critics (and some audience members) see in plays like this. The Humans is a one-act play that (to me) comes across as the first act in a multi-act play. Three generations of a family gather at the home of the youngest daughter/granddaughter for Thanksgiving dinner. During the course of the normal before-dinner, during-dinner, and after-dinner conversations, the characters reveal their health, financial, and relationship issues. And then the play ends. Without anything being resolved, or even seriously addressed. None of the problems that any of the characters faced are especially unusual; the only thing that differs from what many real families face is that all the problems cropped up in the same year.

I've been listening to classical music for over 20 years but last night was the first time that I heard Bernstein's Age of Anxiety, performed by the National Symphony with Jean-Ives Thibaudet on piano. It left me wondering why it isn't performed more often. Today was the Baltimore Symphony performing Philip Glass's Concerto for 2 Tympani, which was basically stereotypical Philip Glass music with tympani parts added. The highlight of my Christmas music season was Cantus' stunning rendition of Biebl's Ave Maria - it would have been worth the price of admission just to hear that one song.

I have not seen the movie.

I was dragged to this at the Kennedy Center last night (12/17/17). Sure, the dancing was nice (but coming the day after the Washington Ballet's Nutcracker, it didn't overwhelm me), but I didn't find anything else about it particularly interesting. As in all too many musicals, the characters were paper thin. The actors were better at dancing than they were at acting; then again, the high school-level dialogue didn't give them much to work with. The story was cheesy (3 men wanting to marry the same woman for apparently no other reason than that she is a very good dancer, at least one of them not even knowing basic things about such as what her religious beliefs were), with an ending that contained no suspense (and the most important plot element - when Lise makes her final choice - happened off-stage). IMO, this is the kind of thing you watch on TV, not something that you pay $$ to watch in a theater.

I made it to the finale. The company, not surprisingly, was a little crisper than on opening night. Their rendition of Serenade was the best performance that I've seen from this company (despite 1 ballerina adding an extra fall to Mr. B's choreography) - I dare say that I was moved. There was a short farewell ceremony after the show, with all the current (and apparently some former) dancers bringing her a rose. It must have been a bit of an emotional moment for the dancers, since I'm guessing that the Suzanne Farrell Ballet's programs were the highlight of the year for many of them. I think that Farrell did a good job of programming dances that displayed different facets of Mr. B's creativity. Meditation is one of the most thought-provoking ballets, and I wonder what will become of it. Farrell kept it under wraps for a number of years, and now the question is whether she will allow other companies to perform it.

I made it to the opening night at the Kennedy Center. The company handled this fairly difficult program pretty solidly, without their usual raggedness (the Kennedy Center has never provided enough funding for a sufficient number of rehearsals), though somehow I didn't feel moved. Maybe I'll get to the Saturday evening performance when I won't be stressed out by another day of putting out fires at work. Before the performance, Washington Performing Arts gave her some sort of award, the "Pola Nirenska Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance". Unfortunately, the 2 presenters apparently just hastily scribbled their speeches, so the award ceremony was far less impressive than Suzanne Farrell deserved.

IMHO IMHO, that scene, the Waltz of the Flowers, and the Sugar Plum Fairy/Cavalier pas de deux were the only parts of the production that truly required professional dancers to pull off well. This might have been due to the need for some dancers to play as many as 4 different roles in a single performance.

Yes. The Snow Queen and King did it.

It was hard to get an impression from their performance at the Kennedy Center. The choreography for the most part was pretty basic and didn't provide much of an opportunity for most of the dancers to show their skills.

Woetzel's program was interesting (and it provided an opportunity for this financially-challenged ballet fan to sit close to the stage), but there were a heck of a lot of empty seats for a program that was listed as a sell-out Thursday morning. It ran longer than advertised, finishing about the same time as the 2nd act of La Bayadere. Julie Kent made a cameo appearance, dancing the famous dance from The King and I with Woetzel. I fortunately managed to get to the Tue, Wed, and Thu La Bayadere performances, since tickets for the weekend performances are both rare and expensive. Since the Fri performance was a sell out, I figured there was no chance to sneak in to watch the 3rd act.

I don't know a whole lot about the Kennedy Center's management (and I will learn even less since I dropped my membership), but my naive impression is that there is room for improvement. Some of their actions have frustrated me, such as not selling standing room tickets for ABT's Swan Lake and paying a LUDICROUSLY high salary ($2.7 million/year) to a National Symphony Orchestra music director who had been fired by several other orchestras.

From the Kennedy Center's perspective there was no reason to schedule these at different times. They will essentially sell out both Woetzel shows (the Saturday show is already sold-out) and the corresponding Mariinsky shows (< 100 tickets left for both).

Last 4 performances of Dracula are essentially sold out!

Curiosity drove me to the opening night of Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes at the Kennedy Center. It actually wasn't all that bad (anything with Marcelo Gomes in it can't be awful). It has a very smooth and crisp flow and reasonably talented dancers (at least by Broadway show standards), without the stupidity that marred Swan Lake. On the other hand, I wouldn't describe it as great. If I hadn't known the plot going in, I wouldn't have figured out what was going on. There was more ballet in the program than I expected. The choreography, other than Gomes' solos, wasn't particularly challenging - lots of lifts to excite the unsophisticated viewers but little complex footwork.

I might be wrong, but I've been under the impression that the MyTix program is only available for shows produced by the Kennedy Center (I've never seen Opera Lafayette use MyTix). Ticket prices for the WB have in the past been a bit of a puzzlement to me, as I have often paid less to see the NYCB than the WB. For this production, they did have a limited number of $25 seats.

You were correct about Richard Tanner. I agree for the most part, though I thought that while Ratmansky did about as much as it's possible to do with Bolero, there is a limit as to how much a choreographer (or listener) can wring out of such a simple, repetitive piece of music. Les Sylphides requires a relatively large number of women, which stretches the depth of a smallish company like the WB. On top of that, 2 women from the professional company were not cast (presumably because of injury), including Maki Onuki, who is possibly their best female dancer. Eunwon Lee suffered both a dislocated shoulder and a sprained ankle in the month before the run began, so she may have not been physically 100 percent (I did not get to the performances where she danced the Le Corsaire pas de deux). It was great to hear live music (especially Prokofiev's music for The Prodigal Son) even if the orchestra could have used a few more musicians.

The National Symphony's rendition of Beethoven's 9th was louder than any music played during any of the NYCB performances.

Nobody who has ever been to a rock concert would consider the music for Times are Racing to be loud. In fact, I've been to classical music performances that at least for small sections was louder than that. While I thought that Times are Racing was a lightweight piece (something on the order of Celts), I prefer to not be stuck with the same old, same old all the time, even at the risk that not all of the new stuff will be good. I'm a fan of Hindemith, and don't understand why he isn't more popular. His music is more melodic than most of his contemporaries.

At least the costumes were better than the costumes for Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes. RFDE was yet another ballet that was hindered by bad costumes. The costumes totally clashed with the music. The Rodeo score rather obviously screams "rural" and "western", but the costumes were more like an exaggeration of what east coast inner city kids might wear.

I've always wondered how one gets on the email list for these discounts. I wasn't on when I had a KC membership and I'm not on now that I've let my membership expire (any organization that can afford to pay $2.7 million/year to a below average orchestra conductor is clearly not in need of donations).

I sat in the 1st tier for the Thursday evening performance, and I would recommend this vantage point to anyone else whose planning to attend either program. Since most of the works are basically abstract dances with no real characters to become emotionally involved with, not being on approximately the same level as the dancers isn't as important as being better able to appreciate the patterns. IMHO, of course. Overall, I enjoyed the performance more than the Wednesday performance. I had no problems with anything in the first 2 pieces. I didn't figure out what Times are Racing was about - maybe I just need to see it again (and with 2 more opportunities...). I loved Hindemith's music for The Four Temperaments - at times I became so engrossed in the music that I stopped watching the dancing.

Wednesday's performance contained a surprisingly shaky (for the NYCB) rendition of Square Dance, with several missteps and a ballerina making an unchoreographed visit to the floor. It didn't help that the was a REALLY annoying man in the row in front of me, who was in almost constant motion and shifted from leaning way over to one to leaning way over to the other side every few seconds (I re-located to the end of the aisle for the rest of the program). They settled down for the rest of the program. I found Odessa to be by far the most interesting. Overall, the show seemed to lack passion (but I'll probably change my mind when I see it again - on a weekend). Leaving, we found ourselves walking behind WB ballerina EunWon Lee. I was surprised how tall she is - probably in the 5'7" to 5'9" range.

Morgann Rose was the longest tenured member of the company, joining it 16 years ago, which means she was with Septime Webre all but the first 2 years of his directorship. She was one of at most two dancers in the company that were involved in Septime's Nutcracker from the first year and was pressed into duty this year in helping to stage it.