Balanchine goes global in City Center festival
The elegant brochure and historical resonance of Balanchine: The City Center Years generated great promise as a highly anticipated event marking the 75th anniversary of midtown Manhattan’s richly dance-historic theater. The six-performance festival (Oct 31 – Nov 4, 2018), which showcased an array of landmark Balanchine works performed on the stage where nearly all had ...
REVIEW: Heidi Duckler Dance’s fully ‘Loaded’ dock-dance at the Ford
A distant, pulsing whir of ambient music accompanies the sight of a peculiar, tall figure as he rambles toward us. We spy him (or is it a she?) through the half-closed gate (or it a gate ‘half-open’?) at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre’s loading dock. This creature, dressed in unisex coveralls like a hip garbage ...
Review: Dogged drills by Djordjevich @ REDCAT’s NOW series
An interesting time, last weekend at REDCAT, watching “CORPS,” a work by post-post-minimalist choreographer Milka Djordjevich featured in the second week of the theater’s well established New Original Works (NOW) series. As a young woman in New York, I performed in the dance company of second-generation minimalist Grethe Holby, an alumnus of Laura Dean’s original ...
Review: ABT’s Misty·fying ‘La Bayadere’ disappoints 2
Let’s start at the end: During curtain calls at American Ballet Theatre’s “La Bayadère” Friday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, ballerina Isabella Boylston gave her bouquet to her partner Jeffrey Cirio with a deferential flourish. Then, in a strange, gender-bending moment, she and third lead Misty Copeland curtsied, and curtsied some more to Cirio, ...
REVIEW: Liza Minnelli, Michael Feinstein enchant at Segerstrom 5
I never saw Judy Garland in performance. I was fifteen in 1969 when she last played in Copenhagen. Now I wish I had gone. But Saturday night, I got a frisson of that Garland feeling, when in a first, I attended Liza Minnelli’s show at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The legendary singer delivered a ...
A neighborly day in this beautywood with Fred Rogers
All that was missing was my blankie and a pacifier. Then I would hunker down all night with “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the latest documentary from Morgan Neville. Neville, whose Twenty Feet from Stardom shone a thrilling light on the unheralded talent of backup singers, in this new doc shifts focus to yet another ...
La vache! French moooo-vies with cows @ COLCOA
Fans of French movies are familiar with seeing scenes from the nation’s rural paysage, the countryside to which Parisians repair for weekends and summer holidays. The usual trope is the stone country-home where, seated ’round big outdoor tables, city dwellers slurp soupe, quaff wine, and discuss in non sequitors the meaning of it all. There they ...
REVIEW: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ @ A Noise Within
When A Raisin in the Sun was first performed on Broadway in 1959, it became a landmark. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to author a Broadway play, and at 29, she became the youngest playwright to receive New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. While the setting of the piece ...
REVIEW: Keigwin + Company Celebrates Bernstein @ The Soraya
Not one, but two, sweet-hearted, newly commissioned dance works by choreographer Larry Keigwin for his charming and excellent dance troupe, Keigwin + Company, had world premieres tonight in the classy, comfortable, and elegant Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya), formerly the Valley Performing Arts Center. The commissions came as part ...
REVIEW: The Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s farewell bid @ The Kennedy Center 1
Forever Balanchine: Farewell Performances The Suzanne Farrell Ballet Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington, D.C. December 7 – 9, 2017 The repertory for “Forever Balanchine” – the final, bittersweet four-performance season of The Suzanne Farrell Ballet – resonated deeply and on many levels. At the Saturday matinee (the same program as Thursday’s opening night, but with ...