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1.5 million people attended her Nutcracker performances.

But one would think that they would announce a few days ahead of time that standing room seats would be available the day of the performance. IIRC, with Mariinsky I knew about standing room tickets enough in advance that I knew to be at the box office when it opened in the morning.

I believe that he had his "charitable" foundation purchase of painting of himself.

No indication that they will sell standing room "seats" for this. I wonder why not, since they did when Mariinsky did Swan Lake. I bought tickets for Thursday specifically to see Gillian Murphy, so I'm disappointed. I have strong doubts that I will still be living in the DC area next season.

The art of the deal!

I'm extremely jealous. I'll be limited to a single trip, as the only show that is not sold out has only a single ticket left (and it's 17 days until opening night!).

This is not going to be a good visit for last minute purchasers. Almost nothing left for any weekend performance. I wonder if they will sell standing room "seats", as they did when Mariinsky did Swan Lake.

The 2 Misty Copeland performances - Friday and Sunday evening - are sold out (and have been for several weeks). The Saturday evening performance is close to being sold out and the 2 matinees have less than 150 tickets left for each. There is still a decent selection for the Wednesday and Thursday shows. Anyone planning to travel from out-of-town would be advised to make their plans sooner rather than later.

Former bandmate Greg Lake has joined Keith in prog heaven.

Based on Sarah Kaufman's review in the Washington Post, I decided to take in the Friday evening show. I kind of wish that I had saved the money. Like the Washington Ballet's Nutcracker, this was primarily a show for children (complete with a G-rated Arabian). While there were some cute, clever ideas in the show, there wasn't a lot of interesting dancing. At most 15 minutes of what I would consider to be professional-level ballet. The show had a bit of a rushed feeling to it, which accentuated the impression that it was intended for kids so that they were trying to keep it as short as possible.

It's the start of The Nutcracker season, and first up in D.C. is the Cincinnati Ballet. I was surprised to see them booked here, as I had thought that the Cincinnati Ballet was barely staying afloat (a few years ago, several of their better dancers jumped to the Colorado Ballet). Is anyone familiar with this company? The roster is a little strange, with no female principal dancers. I need to make a decision on whether to pay Kennedy Center prices (or more - I've gotten tickets for the NYCB for less than the cheapest tickets available for this run).

Unfortunately, this show didn't quite sell out at the Kennedy Center so I was stuck going. It was what I expected: a lot of glitz without much substance. There was some vague theme centered around a man wearing baggy shorts who didn't dance much, but I never figured out what he was supposed to represent. The music was largely techno and the costumes were someone's attempt to create futuristic-looking clothing. In the opening scene, the man in the baggy shorts lay on the floor while men in biker outfits (or something that made me think of bikers) and wearing black stockings over their heads stepped over and around him. With choreography that seemed to be based on Chinese martial arts, the first thought that came into my mind was that it was an ISIS training camp, complete with prisoner to behead. Subsequent sequences included a "pas de trois" which mainly consisted of a female dancer sprinting back and forth between 2 male dancers who lifted her in a variety of ways (I didn't figure out what, if anything, this scene was supposed to represent), a group of dancers stomping around while hunched over so that their hands reached the floor (were they portraying apes?), and dancers "clutching their abdomens as if in gastrointestinal distress" (to quote the Washington Post review). I pretty much tuned out the post-intermission portion (since I had a passenger, I had to stay), not even bothering to put on my glasses when the man in baggy shorts removed the clothing from one of the female dancers. Of course, my opinion was in the minority. And if the goal was solely to create a work that was completely different than any other work, it succeeded. But I like to feel something when I watch a dance (or listen to music).

Chandra Kuykendall also struggled a little with the fouettes last Saturday. Which was unfortunate since the rest of her performance was very good. So it's not surprising that she decided to play it safe. Sharon Wehner during the Sunday matinee nailed the fouettes - the first time that I've seen a ballerina hit all 32 during a performance of the entire ballet.

I wonder if I would get any disagreement from anyone in Denver if I claimed that Maria Mosina was the most talented performer ever to be a member of a Denver-based performing arts organization. Her retirement certainly will present a challenge for the CB. Especially since the other leading ladies, Sharon Wehner and Chandra Kuykendall, are both nearing the ends of their careers (Wehner joined the CB in 1996 and Kuykendall in 1997). I would hate to see the CB, which currently is better than would be expected in a city of Denver's size, suffer a dramatic dropoff in quality.

I'm travelling and don't have my program with me, but I thought that I'd toss out a few comments about the WB's 40th anniversary show (which I managed to get to despite the best efforts of DC-area drivers - I had to take a detour from a detour because 2 major roads were completely shut down by accidents). The show was divided into 3 parts, which seemed to be intended to represent the early years, the recent years, and, presumably, the future. The first part was a performance of Fives, which was choreographed for the WB by the first choreographer that Mary Day brought to DC, Choo San Goh. The second part was a performance of Juanita y Alicia, which was the first work that Septime Webre choreographed for the WB. The third part consisted of 3 famous pas deux (the "Black Swan" pas de deux from Swan Lake - EunWon Lee and Rolando Sarabia, something from The Nutcracker - Venus Villa and Jonathan Jordan, and something from Don Quixote - Maki Onuki and Brooklyn Mack) followed by the final portion of Theme and Variations. EunWon Lee impressed me the most.

Sir Neville Marriner, the founder of The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, died today (Oct. 2). http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37535272

At the 40th Anniversary Show, Julie announced that Ethan Steifel will choreograph a new work for their final program in May.

A talk given (on Sep. 25) by Julie Kent and some of the people who are doing the staging for the WB's 40th anniversary program was filled with statements like "It's called the Washington BALLET, not the Washington DANCE Company" and "Mary Day started a BALLET school, not a DANCE school". This didn't exactly make it difficult to infer that Julie Kent's agenda is to improve the quality and quantity of classical ballet performances.

I hadn't heard about this. The Washington Post article seemed (to me, at least) to imply that it was the Kennedy Center's decision. Since the SF Ballet only performed 1 weekend a year, I don't think that it drew customers away from anything else. What does hurt the WB is that people who go to see ABT/NYCB/Mariinsky tend to not go to the WB.

At yesterday's (Sep. 25) talk, Julie Kent gave a strong impression that she would have liked to have more than 1 performance of the 40th Anniversary program but that she could only get 1 date from the Kennedy Center.

Broadway's all-time most successful musical is on tour, and is spending more than a month at the Kennedy Center. I grudgingly went to it, as the ticket prices were far more than I think that any musical is worth (I got stuck paying $114 for a seat in the back row of the 1st tier! - actually, I think that almost nothing other than the Bolshoi is worth that much money). While it was better than some of the other musicals that I've seen (in particular, Hairspray and The Light in the Piazza), I didn't quite get all the hype. My overall impression is that the creators were more interested in cramming as many songs as they could into it than they were in developing real characters. I suppose that part of this could stem from: a) I was about as far from the stage as it's possible to be in a very large theater; b) the singers were mic'd and highly amplified, so that the singing was more like the singing in a rock concert (a reviewer from the Washington Post thought that the amplification made it seem more like being at a movie than being at a live performance). There were too many things that were unexplained for my taste, such as why the ballet mistress knew so much about the Phantom but didn't tell anyone even after he murdered a stage hand and why the hero had to pursue the Phantom by himself (were the police a bunch of cowards?). All-in-all, I found it to be solidly average. But an A+ for the costume designer.

Apparently Mick is getting at least a little satisfaction.

Today's email from the WB mentions the addition of a female dancer named Eun Won Lee, who has been a principal dancer with the Korean National Ballet.

Saturday evening (7/16) at the Wolf Trap: Gillian Murphy gave her bouquet to Victor Barbee, who played Lord Capulet as apparently his final activity with ABT.

OK. I just couldn't resist going to this (at the Wolf Trap) even though I was a litte under-whelmed when I saw something more akin to the original Riverdance about a decade ago. The show is somewhat revised, but still has everything that we all love and loathe about Riverdance: the infectious music, the high energy performances, the amazingly quick feet, the very attractive, athletic, and precise dancers, the lip-synched "singing", the pre-recorded instrumentals, and the pre-recorded tapping sounds (that were occasionally out of sync with the dancers). The solos, at least according to the program, are basically reproductions of what Michael Flatley and Jean Butler did in the original; certainly the strutting by the leading man and the leather pants made me think of Michael Flatley. It's been a long time, but my impression was that there was less Irish dancing than in earlier incarnations and more musical interludes. I did not remember the American-style tap dancing or the Russian dancers. The Wolf Trap performances (for social reasons I had to attend twice) were fairly poorly attended, with little more than half the tickets sold for each of the 6 performances.