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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 15, 2005

TT: All over the place (cont’d)

November 15, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– On Saturday I flew down to Winston-Salem, where Carolina Ballet was giving three performances of Robert Weiss’ Swan Lake (it was premiered last season in Raleigh, but I was too busy covering Broadway openings to come see it).


The standard four-act version of Swan Lake, choreographed in 1895 by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, is too large in scale to be performed by medium-smallish companies. Weiss had long taken for granted that it was beyond the reach of Carolina Ballet, which employs only thirty-two dancers, until he ran across a children’s-book version of Swan Lake by the Viennese author-illustrator Lisbeth Zwerger in which the story of the ballet is turned into a fairy tale. Reading the book showed him how Swan Lake could be reconceived on an intimate, organically smaller scale. Zwerger gave him permission to use her Schwanensee as the basis for his production, and now Carolina Ballet has its very own two-act Swan Lake, one with just eight swan maidens instead of the usual twenty-four.


Weiss’ Swan Lake is forty-five minutes shorter than the Petipa-Ivanov version and has been altered in a variety of other ways, some small and some significant (among other things, it has a happy ending, Tchaikovsky’s original intention). Above all, it’s been completely rechoreographed in the fast-moving manner of Weiss’ other full-evening story ballets. As I explained a couple of years ago in a Washington Post review of his dance version of Carmen:

If you hadn’t seen any full-length ballets other than, say, “Giselle,” you probably wouldn’t notice anything unusual about it, except that there aren’t any boring parts–and that’s the point.


Having squirmed through far too many three-act kitschfests such as Ben Stevenson’s “Dracula” (which the Houston Ballet inflicted on innocent Washingtonians earlier this month), I’ve lost patience with choreographers who cram the stage with high-priced scenery and costumes, then forget to add steps and serve hot. The emphasis in their faux-romantic pseudo-ballets is placed squarely on pantomime and pageantry, while the dancing, such as it is, must fend for itself. The results invariably end up looking static, the opposite of what a good ballet should be.


Weiss has chosen a different model for “Carmen,” as well as the similarly conceived, equally successful “Romeo and Juliet” that Carolina Ballet premiered last year. Both ballets are choreographed in the manner of Balanchine’s 1962 adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. “I don’t like seeing a lot of people standing around on stage doing nothing,” Weiss says. Instead, he builds each scene around a carefully organized dance sequence, just as Balanchine did in his great Shakespeare ballet….He uses the standard steps and combinations of neoclassical ballet, but always to make specific narrative points.

As a result, Weiss’ Swan Lake, though related to the standard Petipa-Ivanov version, doesn’t feel anything like a slimmed-down alternative. It’s different not only in scale but also in shape and tone, and to my mind is wholly successful on its own terms. I saw it twice and couldn’t have been more impressed. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of Weiss’ version, it strikes me that he’s found a solution to the Swan Lake problem that other regional companies with similarly limited resources would do well to embrace.


– I took Ms. Pratie Place to the Sunday matinee, about which she blogged at length last week, complete with illustrations. It was a heart-stoppingly beautiful day, so we had brunch at an outdoor caf

TT: And damned well about time, too

November 15, 2005 by Terry Teachout

From DVD Journal:

New from our friends at The Criterion Collection are four titles, all due in February. Jean Renoir’s 1938 La B

TT: Number, please

November 15, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– William Holden’s fee in 1957 (plus ten percent of the profits) for playing in The Bridge on the River Kwai: $300,000


– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,038,819.84


(Source: Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness)

TT: Almanac

November 15, 2005 by Terry Teachout

Time is a very strange thing.

So long as one takes it for granted, it is nothing at all.

But then, all of a sudden, one is aware of nothing else.

It is all about us, it is within us also,

In our faces it is there, trickling,

In the mirror it is there, trickling,

In my sleep it is there, flowing,

And between me and you,

There, too, it flows, soundless, like an hour-glass.

Oh, Quinquin, sometimes I hear it flowing

Irresistibly on.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night

And stop all the clocks, all, all of them.

Nevertheless, we are not to shrink from it,

For it, too, is a creature of the Father who created us all.


Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Rosenkavalier (music by Richard Strauss, trans. W.H. Auden)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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