The best dozen dance shows of 2025 – a legacy of memories from Graham Watts’ year in dance
Dance writer Graham Watts looks back at a year of dance and chooses 12 performances from the 157 he saw during 2025.
roundups
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12 of the best in 2024 – fascinating memories from my year in dance
Graham Watts looks back at a year in dance and the 135 performances he saw in 2024. He picks out a dozen of the best.
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Critics round-up: Peter Schaufuss’ Tchaikovsky Trilogy
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…
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Critics round-up: Royal Ballet’s “Birthday Offering”, “A Month in the Country” and “Noces”
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…
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Critics Round-Up: An ‘imaginatively crafted delight’ or a ‘thin ballet’? Royal Ballet’s Alice
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…
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Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Sleeping Beauty
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…
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Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet’s Limen/Marguerite and Armand/Requiem
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,…
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Critics Round-up: New York City Ballet’s Ocean’s Kingdom
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,…
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Critics Round-up: the Royal Opera’s Faust
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…
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Critics Round-up: Royal Ballet in Jewels
This production opens Monica Mason‘s last season as director of the Royal Ballet. To recall the company as it was 10 years ago, after the dreadful year in which Ross Stretton’s directorship had reduced the troupe to a confused and uncertain state – the Queen’s Golden Jubilee gala remains a nightmare for those who sat…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, La Bayadère
Strangely, most critics didn’t attend the Mariinsky‘s signature ballet La Bayadère, the sixth and last of their 2011 London season. Well, it was mid-August and the beaches were calling. However ballet stalwart Clement Crisp was still in the saddle, and gave this evening another 5-star review. If Mr Crisp is now on holiday he…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, Anna Karenina
The fifth offering from the Mariinsky divided the critics. Most had reserves over Alexei Ratmansky‘s storytelling, but even Kenneth MacMillan‘s Manon received a hammering on its first outing. The general consensus seemed to be interesting but not great, with some wonderful interpretations. The Telegraph thought that Ratmansky had set himself an impossible task, Nobody could accuse the…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, Scotch Symphony / Ballet Imperial / In The Night
The fourth Mariinsky programme to grace the Royal Opera stage was another triple bill: Scotch Symphony and Ballet Imperial by George Balanchine, and In The Night by Jerome Robbins. Although this was an evening of American choreography, New York City Ballet territory, the roots are here with this company. Balanchine, one of its favourite sons, and his…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, Don Quixote
The third ballet programme brought to London by the Marrinsky Ballet was Don Quixote, the perennial crowd-pleaser with which the Bolshoi scored such a success a year ago. Strangely only two days of their three-week stay was devoted to this classic, but they scored another hit nevertheless. As The Times noted, What a shame there…
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Critics round-up: Mariinsky at Covent Garden, Homage to Fokine
The second of six programmes brought to London by the Mariinsky was a triple bill of Mikhail Fokine’s choreography: Chopiniana, The Firebird and Scheherazade. The Times explained the programming: In the space of two years, Mikhail Fokine created a trio of works that helped to change our perception of classical ballet. Chopinianaembodied the very idea of abstract ballet; The Firebird was a dramatic…
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Critics round-up: Romeo & Juliet… Osipova, Vasiliev, Lendorf & Ashton
Her Osipova’s Juliet starts out as a hyper teenager, whirling on brilliantly fast feet. There’s an immediate abandon to her dancing, movement sweeping through her small frame. As an actress, she doesn’t always find the balance between this delicate choreography and her own huge personality. The Independent The limpid beauty of Osipova’s dancing — all…
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Critics round-up: Tyne Daly in ‘Master Class’ – “remarkable”
Tyne Daly plays that greatest of divas, Maria Calla, in Terrence McNalls Mast Class at New York’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Her much anticipated performance has been well received: Towering before us — and tower she does, though she is not particularly tall — the celebrated opera singer is undeniably, overwhelmingly there. And yet she’s not there at all. One of the…
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Critics round-up: Sylvie Guillem at Sadler’s Wells – “Dancers have a cruelly curt use-by date. They’re better fresh. Or are they?”
She’s done it again, and everyone’s delighted that Guillem still has the possibility to enchant, astonish and all those other adjectives that the press have been hurling around in the last 24 hours. Here’s a selection: At 46, Sylvie Guillem may have abandoned her former ballerina roles, but she is still one of the most astonishing dancers…
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Critics round-up: Richard III with Kevin Spacey
Well the critics loved much, if not all, of the Bridge Project’s much anticipated swan song production of Richard III with Kevin Spacey. The production is now at London‘s Old Vic theatre before going on tour, finishing with two months at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from January 10, 2012. Spacey’s performance above all wowed everyone: There…
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Critics round-up: Shrek The Musical opens in London
Shrek The Musical has opened in London‘s West End and seems to have generally won over the nation’s critics. It’s New York run wasn’t a runaway success and producers must have been a little nervous on the press night. Lots of the New York production has been recycled, even Shrek’s green rubber suit… yuk! Nigel Lindsay plays…
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Critics round-up: Strictly Gershwin with the English National Ballet at London’s Royal Albert Hall
Difficult-to-please Clement Crisp gives a four-star crit for the English National Ballet‘s dance show “Strictly Gershwin”: For this show is jolly, welcoming, coasting along on tunes that everyone knows, and it is done with a fine sense of theatre, which has ever been Deane’s forte. In this revival, it is even more slick and brassy…
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Simon Keenlyside is “singing on the top of his form” or has a “tendency to shout tonelessly”?
Simon Keenlyside’s British début as Macbeth at The Royal Opera House has both bemused and wowed the critics. After the live relay we can all have our say, but here is a smattering of divided opinion from the opening night critics. Hilary Finch in The Times was blown away: The English baritone, singing on the…
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Critics round-up: Royal Ballet Triple Bill – Scènes de ballet – Voluntaries – Rite of Spring
“Whether you regard the triple bill as an evening of highlights or an insubstantial pageant depends on the programme,” – says the Daily Express, before going on to review the Royal Ballet‘s latest triple bill. I suppose that’s true, but as someone who loves picnics, antipasti, collections of short stories and boxes of mixed truffles, I…
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Critics round-up: American Ballet Theatre – The Bright Stream
His two-act comedy ballet “The Bright Stream,” new with the Bolshoi in 2003 and danced by that company at the Metropolitan Opera House in 2005, joined Ballet Theater’s repertory this January and is being danced at the Met through Wednesday. Though it’s neither as poetic nor as accomplished as works he has created in the…
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Critics round-up: Ballo della regina (Balanchine) – Live Fire Exercise (Wayne McGregor) – Danse à grande vitesse (Christopher Wheeldon)
The Royal Ballet’s new triple bill brings two new pieces: Balanchine’s Ballo della Regina, and a new creation by Wayne McGregor called Live Fire Exercise. The critics were almost all in agreement here. Loving the showy Balanchine, some doubts about the McGregor choreography, and a general thumbs-up for the company. Ballo della regina Music – Giuseppe Verdi (dances from…
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Critics round-up: Manon’s Leanne Benjamin and Steven McRae
Edward Watson‘s pulling out left the first night to newcomer Steven McRae but he had a very experienced Manon in Leanne Benjamin. This is how they were seen by the critics. LEANNE BENJAMIN – “one of the most painfully involving Manons imaginable” Times – Leanne Benjamin, queen of the Royal Ballet‘s Manons. Her dancing was a little…
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“Ideas batter me like hailstones. Who am I?” – Frankenstein at the National Theatre
Frankenstein, the play, directed by Danny Boyle, is just the latest in an almost innumerable sequence of stage, television and film versions of Shelley’s book. Ever since it was published, almost 200 years ago, arty types in theatre, movies and television, have found the story of Frankenstein’s act of life-giving irresistible. Boyle’s Frankenstein for the…
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Anna Nicole’s breasts loom largely on the Royal Opera House stage – “I’ll eat my six-gallon hat if it’s not a stonking great hit.”
“The sad but true story of Anna Nicole Smith, a two-bit, surgically enhanced American stripper, nude model and C-list celebrity who married an 89-year-old billionaire and ended up, at the age of 39, dead from an overdose of prescription drugs in a lonely hotel room.” Thus Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph sums up the new…
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The worst and the worst of the Spider-man reviews: a round-up of the first “official” reviews
Critics have taken things into their own hands and attended (unofficially) what was to have been the opening night of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark instead of the currently announced 15 March opening. The 7 February date was in itself a postponement from an earlier opening night. After all the ungenerous Twitter and blog buzz, the professional…
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