The contemporary triple bill Prism starts its Sydney season on November 7, after which, just for something completely different, The Australian Ballet will dive back into David McAllister’s blingy, ultra-traditional The Sleeping Beauty. It started its national run in Adelaide in July and had a Brisbane season in August. It goes without saying the company is versatile. That’s…
Tag: Jerome Robbins
The Australian Ballet announces its 2025 season
In what will be David Hallberg’s fifth year as artistic director of The Australian Ballet, the company’s 2025 program offers new works by William Forsythe and Stephanie Lake, the return of John Neumeier’s Nijinsky, the company premiere of Jerome Robbins’s Glass Pieces and, for Melbourne and Canberra, Johan Inger’s powerful Carmen following its Australian premiere in Sydney this year. Revivals of…
West Side Story. Opera Australia. Fleet Steps, Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney, March 22, 2024.
Speaking in 1985 at a symposium about the creation of West Side Story, Jerome Robbins said he had wanted to see how far he, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents could go in bringing their “crafts and talents”, as he put it, to a musical. “Why did we have to do it separately and elsewhere? Why did…
About last week … March 26-April 1
A CLASH of ballet opening nights saw Queensland Ballet’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake go head to head – well, from my perspective. They were in different cities at the time. For reasons both artistic and logistical, I went to the first performance of Dream in Brisbane on April 1…
In which I fail to stop my list at 10
THIS year I saw more than 200 performances and, over the past week or so, have written about the people, plays, operas, dance works and musicals that spoke to me most strongly. Now I cull the list to 14 – just because that’s how it turned out – and a supplementary, the last being something…
Top 10 in dance for 2014
DANCE is my great passion but this year there wasn’t a huge amount to bowl me over.Certainly I saw plenty of fine dancing – when does one not? – but in classical ballet there were few new works of substance. Well, none actually. There were pleasing new versions of existing ballets, although they didn’t quite…
Tharp, Ratmansky, Robbins
American Ballet Theatre, Lyric Theatre, Brisbane, September 5 and 6. TWYLA Tharp was never one to make things easy for dancers or viewers. It would take many more than the two shows I saw in Brisbane to absorb even a fraction of the beauties and complexities of Bach Partita, but it took only one performance…
Heart untouched; soul unshaken
Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, August 28. KEVIN McKenzie’s version of Swan Lake for American Ballet Theatre is a medieval fairy tale of transformation. A woman is turned into a swan. An evil lake-dwelling sorcerer becomes a devastatingly attractive nobleman in the blink of an eye. Two lovers die by drowning but moments…
The King and I
Presented by John Frost and Opera Australia, April 19, Lyric Theatre, Brisbane. LISA McCune has probably never sounded or looked lovelier. As Anna Leonowens in The King and I, McCune has all the sweet-spot songs – Hello, Young Lovers, I Whistle a Happy Tune, Getting to Know You and Shall We Dance? – and gets…
There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
In March 2008, when I was still on staff at The Australian, I wrote a piece about musical theatre ahead of an Opera Australia production of My Fair Lady. With OA and John Frost opening The King and I in Brisbane, with Melbourne and Sydney seasons to follow, I pulled it out of the vault. THE golden…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 