★★★✰✰ All up, I think this production demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of "Raymonda" as a ballet. It certainly is a fabulous looking (and listening) calling card which might tour well...
Tag - Richard Hudson
★★★✰✰ I was eager to see American Ballet Theatre’s Sleeping Beauty, mounted by Alexei Ratmansky last year, because of the enthusiastic reviews it has received in the United States. The Paris premiere, however, met with muted acclaim...
★★★★✰ American Ballet Theatre’s spring season has turned into a kind of voyage into the mind of Alexei Ratmansky, its choreographer-in-residence since 2009.
★★★★✰ "Ratmansky’s new staging is a Beauty like you have never seen before: it uncovers the original ballet’s genuine beauty, which faded over the years under the clutter of modern revisions."
Q: What have you learned about Petipa from the notations? Ans: Looking at the notations changed my taste. Honestly, I just can’t stand seeing productions of the classics any more, because I know how far it is from Petipa’s intentions...
Perhaps the most striking element in Alexei Ratmansky’s new Sleeping Beauty for American Ballet Theatre is its musicality, the way the steps, peppered with accents and breaths, unspool within the music.
The ballet radiates warmth, but also an awareness of death....
The result is oddly old-fashioned - even more so than John Cranko’s version, which the Canadians had performed since 1964.
Gudrun Bojesen, the Royal Danish Ballet's leading classical ballerina, is at an interesting stage of her career...
So far as I know, no major company has ever before attempted a time-shifted Bayadère, so Hübbe had the whole of history to pick from. He chose the later years of the British Raj...
Hubbe - handsome and captivating as ever in tight black jeans and an Errol Flynn mustache - assured the Works and Process audience that the famously elegiac Shades scene has not been tampered with...
...cut down to a single act and shown as part of a properly-balanced double or triple bill it could work beautifully, rather than sending me home feeling hungry.