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I'm a little surprised to see that there are LOTS of tickets available for all the remaining performances. All of the performances have more than a quarter of the seats left. I'll hopefully get to the Friday evening and both weekend matinee performances. It was interesting to see Andrew Litton conducting the orchestra. How often does a visiting ballet company have a better conductor than the resident symphony orchestra?

I have a less harsh view on The Most Incredible Thing. Sure, it's a lightweight piece, probably most appropriate as a season-ender (as, for example, the Colorado Ballet has used Celts). I thought that it was fun, even if the choreography wasn't at the elite level. And after the costumes that ABT showed up with for Sleeping Beauty, I probably will never find any other costumes to be a turn-off. The biggest problem that I had is that without reading the program I would have had no idea of what was going on. Was the pair of dancers who were wearing matching halves of a costume supposed to be the king? Tchiakovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 is my current favorite Balanchine dance. Good riffs for the corps as well as the soloists. There were a couple of bobbles in Wednesday's performance, which proves that everyone is human.

If you go to Friday's show, it might be "After the Snow". It's unfortunate that the KC crammed their 4 major ballet programs into a 7-week period. I skipped tonight's opener because after going to shows Wednesday through Sunday evenings I just couldn't work up the energy to sit through a 3-hour show.

I made it to the 2/25 (Thursday) performance. It was a bit of a mixed bag. GOOD: The dancing was uniformly crisp and tasteful, as is the usual for Russian companies. Raymonda and the various variations babes turned in stellar performances. The costumes were great. The dancers seemed more committed to the story than the ABT dancers did for Sleeping Beauty. NOT-SO-GOOD: The choreography for the primary male characters was pretty lackluster - well below the capabilities of dancers in an elite company. The first act is in serious need of editing. Not a lot happened during it. Too much prancing and posing. A few nice solos for Raymonda and a couple of variations babes, but the rest of the choreography in the 1st act was pretty basic. I kept waiting throughout the production for Abderakhman to take off on a power solo, but it never happened. No wonder that Raymonda preferred the other guy. Too many dances by characters who didn't have names. I had a very bad day in a pretty bad week, so I forgot to check BA to see where other attendees were going to be hanging out .

The schedule would worry me if I were still in Colorado. Unless The Little Mermaid is more than a kids' show (ala the Washington Ballet's version of The Nutcracker), they're essentially down to 2 programs plus The Nutcracker. Is the CB financially sound these days?

Julie Kent and Victor Barbee as co-ADs?

I would think that they would be looking for a young, enthusiastic person. Webre was still in his 30's when he took over. It's a tough job, having to compete with all the companies that the Kennedy Center brings in (the WB's next program is running the same week as the Mariinsky Ballet!!!). Webre's personality and willingness to address audiences were, IMHO, a big asset for the WB.

I'm not sure how I managed to get 2 threads started on this topic. I definitely only typed my post in once. Hopefully, the moderators can delete the other one or merge the threads.

The Washington Ballet sent out an email this morning announcing that Artistic Director Septime Webre is resigning, effective at the end of the season. The e-mail implies that he wants to concentrate on choreography and on helping other companies to stage the pieces that he's already created.

The Washington Ballet sent out an email this morning announcing that Artistic Director Septime Webre is resigning, effective at the end of the season. The e-mail implies that he wants to concentrate on choreography and on helping other companies to stage the pieces that he's already created.

The snow on Virginia Avenue and on 23rd Street was cleared off Thursday night. There shouldn't be anything more than the normal hassles getting into the Kennedy Center for the remainder of the shows. There has been a pick-up in ticket sales. I'm going to have to decide pretty quickly if I'm going to go to the Sunday evening performance.

On Wednesday evening, the roads around the Kennedy Center were typical of other roads in the DC area. The rightmost lane of Virginia Avenue was unusable. Ditto for 23rd Street (I got to the KC via the Memorial Bridge). Fortunately, traffic in the downtown area was much lighter than normal. I really don't understand why it is taking more than 4 days to clear the roads, especially when 70 percent of the snow has melted.

For anyone going to the Thursday performance and planning to park in the Kennedy Center parking garage (as I was forced to by an accomplice who was late getting ready to go), be aware that Virginia Avenue has only 2 lanes in each direction, and that is making getting into the parking garage more time-consuming than usual.

Worst..costumes..ever (for the men). I can't begin to describe the mazurka men's costumes, but my thought was that they were something from a fraternity hazing ritual.

They may have been hoping that they could get the Friday evening show in (and it probably wouldn't have been too bad getting there - only an inch of snow at 5:00 - but getting home might have been a different story). Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that they can do the Sunday show. I'm fortunate that I had the flexibility to see it during the week. It was worth seeing, but it wasn't love at first sight. I would have liked to see it again, because I often enjoy ballets more the second time than the first. I did think that it was a little lengthy; the first act seemed to drag a bit. The costumes were quite impressive.

Miracle on 34th Street, at least the original black-and-white version. Because I still believe in Santa Claus.

I usually agree with Anne Midgette's reviews. I guess that we all have are little quirks that cause us to have some unique tastes. There was enthusiastic applause with a partial standing ovation. I don't know if definitive conclusions can be drawn from that, because regardless of what one thought of the music one would have to acknoledge that there were some pretty impressive singers in the cast. Really, the singing, acting, and staging were all high quality.

I was arm-twisted into spending a lot of money to see the final performance of Philip Glass' oper,a Appomattox at the Kennedy Center on Nov. 22. This production is heavily revised from the original version that premiered in San Francisco in 2007. In the original version, the last days of the Civil War filled most of the opera, with 3 flash forwards - the Colfax massacre, the 1964 murder of 3 civil rights workers in Mississippi, and visit to the prison where Edgar Ray Killen - the mastermind of the 1964 murders - was imprisoned. The revised opera condensed the Civil War portion (along with the Colfax massacre) down to the 1st (of 2) acts, albeit a rather lenghty act, and created a largely new 2nd act highlighting Martin Luther King's and LBJ's efforts to eliminate barriers that prevented blacks from voting along with the 1964 murders and Edgar Ray Killen segments. It was an interesting attempt at a social statement, but ended up being a little too preachy for my taste, as if Glass and Librettist Christopher Hampton didn't trust that if they merely presented a story about blacks' struggles for freedom and equal rights that the audience would get their point. Especially, the Edgar Ray Killen segment, in which he sings about how necessary he thought the murders were and how worthless he thought that the Jewish and black people killed were, seemed pointless. As opera, well, it didn't do much for me. The music was, IMHO, mediocre. There was little variation in tempo or style in the vocal parts over the nearly 2 hours and 50 minutes of performance, no matter whether it was Martin Luther King or Robert E. Lee or Mary Todd Lincoln that was singing. The orchestra parts often seemed unrelated to the singing. The stories (there really were 2 separate stories) moved along so slowly that it would have been possible to take a visit to the restroom during the performance without feeling like you missed anything. I'm guessing that this opera won't be widely performed because of the expense (due to the large number of leading roles). I won't say that it's not worth seeing, but I wouldn't suggest that someone pay a lot of money to see it.

Agreed. I found the Sunday performance to be much better, without the noticeable little hops/extra steps. When I get to choose my own schedule, I generally try to avoid opening nights.

I attended the Friday show, and thought that Walpurgisnacht was a little stiff. Perhaps the 15-minute delay owing to the MASSIVE logjam at the will call window played a role. Or maybe I was just in a grouchy mood after standing in line for 20 minutes only to have the ushers allow people who had been at the back of the line go ahead of me. I don't know what the reason for scheduling the performance at 7:00 was, but that undoubtedly contributed to the bulk of the audience arriving only shortly before curtain time.

Apparently, last season the Baltimore Symphony combined with a theater company to produce A Midsummer Night's Dream with the orchestra performing Mendelssohn's incidental music. This season they tried again with Romeo and Juliet, performing an abridged version of Shakespeare's play accompanied by Prokofiev's music. IMHO, it was less than successful. There were several deficiencies from my perspective. The biggest obviously was that neither the dialogue nor the music were created to be background. In this production, the dialogue won out, with the music used like a movie soundtrack (and not in a dominant role as in, for example, Alexander Nevsky). To make matters worse, the actors were amplified, often to the point of nearly drowning out the music. I consider the final 3.5 minutes of Prokofiev's music to not only be some of the most beautiful music ever written but also extremely contemplative and in no need of explanation. So it was annoying to have an actor (playing the Prince of Verona) delivering a sermon during that portion of the music (I still have memories of many in the audience, including men, reaching for kleenex during the finale of the Colorado Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet a few years ago). Another problem (at least for me) is that they used a very small cast, with many members playing several parts. This not only resulted in a single actor reciting both sides of a conversation, but also in some very incongruous casting, with a man playing Juliet's nurse (while wearing a tuxedo!) and a woman playing Tybalt.

Cao Shuci was not listed as having a major role in the program for the Wolf Trap performance. I was underwhelmed by the production, but my Chinese co-conspirator enjoyed it.

I pretty much agree (having attended the June 23 performance at the Kennedy Center). Though since I haven't seen Conspiracy, I didn't make the connection that California did. The one thing that I didn't like about Adagio and Scherzo was that at times there were 2 or 4 pairs on stage not doing the same thing but spaced too far apart to watch all of them, and it was distracting to be wondering what else was going on while being focused on one pair. I was very excited when I saw that Rite of Spring was on the program, so it was disappointing that the piece was an abstract dance set to Stravinsky's music rather than a, well, rite of spring theme. I thought that it was clever when he had the 3 women all dancing as if they had partners while the 2 men rotated between the 3 women, but that idea ended up being, IMHO, over-used. I just didn't think that there were enough ideas in the choreography to last the 30+ minutes that the music lasts. But maybe it was just my disappointment at not getting what I was expecting. It would be interesting to see the program again, but tonight's performance was cancelled due to "unforeseen circumstances", which most likely was that they didn't foresee that they would only be able to sell around 700 tickets total for 2 scheduled performances.

I went to the opening night performance. I've been hesitant to post anything about it, because: 1) I often miss a lot the first time that I watch a program and tend to have a higher opinion after a second viewing; 2) opening night performances often aren't as good as subsequent performances. That being said, I thought that it was inferior to the ABT's presentation. The Royal Ballet re-worked all the choreography, and I thought that the parts for the supporting dancers (e.g., Mercedes, Espada, the gypsies) could have been better. They certainly weren't as spectacular as in the ABT's version. They used a fairly large number of performers as villagers, etc., and for some reason I found it distracting that there were all these people on the stage who didn't spend a lot of time dancing. I kept waiting for a big ensemble number to break out, and it didn't really happen (this likely is one of my "first viewing" problems - judging a production on how it fit my expectations rather than on its own merits). I was not able to talk them into selling me a ticket for $35, so I ended up paying $59. Of course, the original price for the seat was $92, so I still got a great bargain.

Don Quixote is hardly a novelty in DC, this being the 3rd production of it since 2013. With 7 performances and high ticket prices, it shouldn't be surprising that they can't sell it out.