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Critics round-up: Peter Schaufuss’ Tchaikovsky Trilogy

Jul 302012

This promises to be the most fun critics round-up yet. Rarely have reviews been so unanimously foul. Being that there was so little to save, the critics left their stars in the drawer, and polished their metaphors with seeming glee.

No amount of special pleading, of aesthetic jiggery-pokery, can excuse Schaufuss’s weird libretto as it plays its fatuous game by way of crass mickey-mousing and dismal romping to Tchaikovsky’s ardours.

is Clement Crisp’s response in The Financial Times to Peter Schaufuss’ proposal to link three Tchaikovsky ballets together as dreams within dreams: A Nightmare (Swan Lake), A Sensual Awakening (Sleeping Beauty) and A Happy Dream (Nutcracker).

Pyotr Ilyich must be revolving in his grave,

remarked David Dougill in The Sunday Times.… [continue reading]

Critics round-up: Royal Ballet’s “Birthday Offering”, “A Month in the Country” and “Noces”

ballet, roundup 1 Response »

Jul 092012

Monica Mason’s last pickings from the Royal Ballet repertoire before leaving her post as the company’s director included two works by the Royal Ballet’s founder choreographer, Frederick Ashton - Birthday Offering and A Month in the Country - and Bronislava Nijinska’s “extraordinary” Noces. It was Ashton who invited Nijinska to restage her masterpiece for the company in 1966 and, as the New York Times notes,

When you keep watching, you see that all three ballets ask the same pliancy of the torso, tipping every which way while the lower body keeps busy.

The critics awarded the Dame’s choices and the Royal Ballet’s dancing with a splatter of 4 and 5-star reviews.

Birthday Offering

Birthday Offering was created in 1956 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company’s foundation and to show off the company’s ballerinas to the young Queen Elizabeth.… [continue reading]

Critics Round-Up: An ‘imaginatively crafted delight’ or a ‘thin ballet’? Royal Ballet’s Alice

ballet, roundup 4 Responses »

Mar 252012

We know that the Royal Ballet’s dancers are exceptional, we’ve seen that the designs and lighting are magical, but the jury is still out on whether Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland satisfies as a theatrical piece.

Clement Crisp’s final paragraph from his Financial Times review of the current run was,

But for all the unflagging energies, physical and emotional, that its cast brings to the choreography, this is a game of “keep it moving and they won’t see the holes”. And the holes – the coarse score, the blustering, false drama – are too large to disguise.

Which he’d already spotted on its first outing,

I was less than enraptured by this blatant affair at its creation last year. In its current revival certain changes have been made – significantly in splitting an interminable first act into two – but the sum effect is still of blazing misconceptions in supposing that such a narrative can admit of translation into movement.… [continue reading]

Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty

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Nov 092011

In 2006 Monica Mason decided to go back to the beginning with the Royal Ballet’s signature ballet, The Sleeping Beauty: consign the 2003 Makarova disaster (“dramatically shapeless and emotionally flat” said The Times) to the dustbins, and restore Oliver Messel’s 1946 production. That was the year that the Vic-Wells Ballet moved to the Royal Opera House.

There has now been a slight change, as David Dougill explains in The Sunday Times,

In 2006, Monica Mason and Christopher Newton made this splendid restaging of the landmark 1946 production, but the costumes were reinterpreted. Now we find that many of those for the palace scenes have been meticulously re-created from Oliver Messel’s original archive, and what a spectacular difference it makes to see his bold, vibrant palette of colours and intricate decorations.… [continue reading]

Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Limen/Marguerite and Armand/Requiem

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Oct 122011

It seems that the Royal Ballet can’t go wrong. The company has been on a winning streak, which is continuing, justly, into Monica Mason’s final season as director.

This triple bill succeeds in refracting Royal Ballet choreography into three distinct places, each one occupied by one of the company’s three resident choreographers — Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Wayne McGregor. Ismene Brown for The Arts Desk writes,

The cool physical activity of McGregor’s Limen, the crimson passions of Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, the symbolic sculpture of MacMillan’s Requiem - the weekend’s new triple bill at Covent Garden shows three faces of British ballet-making over the past half-century. While none is the masterpiece of its creator, together they describe an arc over time where lyrical emotion became replaced by gymnastic motion, compression by diffusion, individual idiosyncrasy by a kind of balletic collective.… [continue reading]

Critics Round-up: New York City Ballet’s Ocean’s Kingdom

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Oct 022011

The review headlines ran “That Sinking Feeling”, “Soggy Ocean Kingdom”, “All Wet” — you get the idea.

But this was Sir Paul McCartney’s début in the world of ballet, the company was the great Yew York City Ballet, Sir Paul’s famous daughter, designer Stella, was doing costumes, and Peter Martins the choreography. So a lot of red carpet, flash bulbs, happy critics getting a couple of days in New York, famous faces in the audience, and column inches. Most of those inches written after the curtain had come down, were less than favourable.

Most remained content about the musical side of things,

The main problem isn’t Mr. McCartney’s music, which is generic, good-natured, old-fashioned pastiche, with no particular vocabulary of its own, no structural sophistication and no sign of the remarkable gift for melody he demonstrated in his Beatles days.… [continue reading]

Critics Round-up: the Royal Opera’s Faust

opera, roundup No Responses »

Sep 242011

Gounod’s Faust is, on the one hand, a gift for directors and performers — as Geoff Brown says in The Times, “It’s a Cecil B De Mille film directed by Bob Fosse, and Hell on Earth in more ways than one” — but it can often inspire productions so over the top with racy ideas and cut-out villains that an audience couldn’t care less about the characters on stage. David McVicar’s production is one of these, according to the Financial Times’ Richard Fairman:

The producer, David McVicar, delivers a traditional show at heart. There is an overall concept – Faust represents the aged Gounod, torn between the theatre and the church, and witnessing the closing years of the Second Empire in France – but it feels lazily worked out and rather too susceptible to kitsch.… [continue reading]

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Critics round-up: Peter Schaufuss’ Tchaikovsky Trilogy

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Critics round-up: Royal Ballet’s “Birthday Offering”, “A Month in the Country” and “Noces”

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Critics Round-Up: An ‘imaginatively crafted delight’ or a ‘thin ballet’? Royal Ballet’s Alice

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Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty

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Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Limen/Marguerite and Armand/Requiem

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Critics Round-up: New York City Ballet’s Ocean’s Kingdom

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Critics Round-up: the Royal Opera’s Faust

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