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…
Tonight Verona’s famous Arena is sold out. All 15,000 seats will be full to watch Roberto Bolle and his ‘friends’ dance in the open air. It is a magical place. Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore (the equivalent of the Financial Times, and the same colour) spoke to him. Unfortunately half of these interviews are always…
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…
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…
Dame Edna Everage is starring in her first pantomime: Dick Whittington at the New Wimbledon Theatre. The Financial Times talked to her manager, 77 year-old Barry Humphries. On Melbourne in the 50s “Scorn and disgust were my favourite occupations. If you could have been in Melbourne in the 1950s, you would have understood. It was a…
The Financial Times has some, understandable, reserves in an otherwise excellent review: My cheers for the ensemble are as loud as anyone’s, as also my admiration for the principals: for José Martin’s vivid Lescaut, for Gary Avis‘s tumescent Monsieur GM, for Itziar Mendizabel as Lescaut’s mistress, sailing through terrible difficulties with sublime insouciance, for Bennet…
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…
The Financial Times visited Milan’s historic theatre to witness Sergei Vikharev‘s reconstruction of Raymonda – a production which is sending ripples of interest and excitement around the ballet community. This blog alone, and its associated YouTube channel, has received thousands of extra visits to read about Raymonda, pushing the associated posts to the top of the most viewed…
This was very much Anna Netrebko‘s Anna Bolena. True, it is the title role, but the other characters have to work quite hard too. Her face was emoting from every review, and so here’s a round-up of what the critic’s had to say about Anna as Anna at the Met. Anne Midgette’s review for The…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Mariinsky kicked off their 3-week stay at the Royal Opera House with Swan Lake. An obvious, and right, choice, Immutable is the Mariinsky’s root foundation in classical tradition. Everything they dance speaks of “schooling”. Whatever more modern works the repertory now embraces, the classic ballets provide the company’s signature — none more so in…
In one of the worst reviews of the season, the Financial Times‘ Clement Crisp finds almost nothing to like in Carlos Acosta‘s Premieres Plus at the London Coliseum: I remember visiting East Berlin when that city was still divided, and being intrigued by shops whose windows were filled with boxes which proclaimed delicacies of many kinds….
In a splattering of mainly four and five-star reviews it was, perhaps surprisingly, the Financial Times‘s Clement Crisp, maybe the hardest critic to please, who showered compliments over the company without restraint: The world’s stages are littered with productions of Swan Lake, the majority of which – as I know to my cost – are horrid and foolishly…
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…
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…
In Scherr’s Financial Times review of the Royal Danish Ballet‘s performances at the Lincoln Center, she gives a highly original account of what constitutes August Bournonville’s choreographic style: Instead of bravado jumps and turns for the men and displays of leg for the women, lads and ladies alike skimmed the stage in flickery jumps punctuated by…
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…
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…
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…
In 35 years’ acquaintance with Meistersinger, this was by far the slowest, dullest, most insipid I have seen. Apparently oblivious to the composer’s instruction to take the music at a “moderately moving” pace, Vladimir Jurowski holds up each phrase for inspection, polishes it, presents it for our admiration – then proceeds to do the same…
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…
It looks as though everyone got the joke after all. Even in Utah, it seems, with no damning articles or negative reviews. Time reports: “I was prepared for scatological humor, generous doses of the F-word, and off-color bawdiness—this is South Park without network censorship, remember?” a Mormon reviewer blogged on BeliefNet, “but I wasn’t prepared for my…
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…
“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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