Author Archives: jsl915@aol.com

After the Royal Danish Ballet’s opening night last month (their first visit to Manhattan since 1988!!), I was interviewed by Louise With of the Danish newspaper Borsen, who quoted me this way: “On the whole it was very good. And the best … Continue reading →

Ballet dancers are today so generally overworked and often so palpably under-rehearsed that improvement has to be a matter of perpetual back-and-forward sliding. So it was good to see that Alexandre Hammoudi’s act1 solo in Ratmansky’s The Bright Stream at ABT last … Continue reading →

On Wednesday I went to JFK  to meet someone coming in from San Francisco.  Sitting in traffic on the Grand Central, I thought of a story told me by the late Linda Gravenites, who made marvelous clothes in Haight Ashbury in the … Continue reading →

I went twice yesterday to ABT’s mixed-bill program.  Far from Antony Tudor’s best ballet,  his 1967 Shadowplay, which I’ve never seen before, nevertheless was soothing balm, a relief from the busyness of the new ballets by Millepied, Ratmansky and Wheeldon with which … Continue reading →

I just watched Lisa Della Casa’s Arabella, filmed live in Munich in 1960.  Here the salient question becomes not whether opera singers in the past could act but instead — can today’s opera singers live up to the acting standard of … Continue reading →

Speaking of the New Amsterdam, when I went to the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2008 to see a 1920 silent While New York Sleeps, I was astonished to see in the film footage that could only … Continue reading →

 I’ve always assumed that my family had a distant relation to Abraham Erlanger, the fearsome uber-producer who was at his zenith at the turn of the 20th century. He went into partnership with Marc Klaw; together they joined forces with … Continue reading →

From the current City Arts, here’s my piece on Paul Taylor’s Esplanade.

From the current Ballet Review, here’s my interview with Tatiana Legat about Yuri Soloviev, which I conducted with Lisa Whitaker, a friend of both Soloviev and Legat. The issue’s on the stands now.

Also on Wednesday was Martins’ The Magic Flute, in which Tiler Peck demonstrated how far along her dancing has come.  She doesn’t seem any longer to be in thrall to that doctrinaire Balanchine thing of not keeping her heels down, trying to always … Continue reading →