★★★★✰ Francesca Hayward is entirely believable as a very young Juliet, overwhelmed by her first experience of falling in love.
Tag - Shakespeare
Both the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are opening their 2021/22 seasons with the same ballet - Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Jann Parry takes a look at how one of the most admired narrative ballets of the 20th century came to be and details of the many dancing debuts we can look forward to...
★★★✰✰ All up this is a most thoughtful and involving R&J for our time, one that with some dramatic honing will have a long life and which can speak powerfully to both new and old audiences. It's a dance of consequence, as ever, from Rosie Kay.
Rosie Kay’s new and radical take on "Romeo + Juliet" gets premiered on the 8 September at the Birmingham Hippodrome. Foteini Christofilopoulou with a heads-up & special shoot direct from the dance studio.
★★★★✰ San Francisco Ballet has elected to bring a recently filmed version of the ballet to its audiences as the first program of 2021. And what a lovely way to kick off the digital season!
★★★✰✰ The first concert was not much of a consolation for all that we have lost. So far, the Royal Ballet appears a token add-on to the opera's contributions...
★★★★✰ Performances across the board are stupendous, reminding us that interpretations evolve and change, and do not disappoint.
★★★★✰ 8th March at Sadler's Wells was the last time we were able to see Richard Alston's work performed by his own company of dancers. Jann Parry with a full and perceptive review of Alston's latest work and last company show.
★★✰✰✰ There was certainly some spectacle and some good dancing, and not just from the big stars. However, the most heavily promoted piece and world premiere was an excruciating fifteen minutes of disappointment...
★★✰✰✰ For all Marston’s qualifications, I found her Jane Eyre to be a dreary affair, theatrically dutiful and choreographically thin.
★★★★✰ For Balanchine, Shakespeare’s characters are two-dimensional types, exemplary but wholly unreal. They are shadows in a shadow-play, representing this or that quality...
Jasper Conran is producing new designs for Christopher Wheeldon’s "Within the Golden Hour", to be premiered by the Royal Ballet on the 8 May 2019. Jann Parry talks to Conran about the designs and his earlier and extensive work for David Bintley at Birmingham Royal Ballet…
★★★★✰ What if the star cross’d lovers hadn’t died, but had run away, got married, had a child, reached middle age and hit a relationship crisis?
Ivan Putrov's latest project, Against the Stream, gets its premiere on Sunday 7 April 2019 at the London Coliseum. Jann Parry finds out all about it...
★★★★✰ An hour in the company of Nikki and JD is well spent.
★★★★★ Another year and another terrific bill from Ballet Black, mixing two strong and sophisticated works from much sought after international choreographers. ...one of the company's finest nights.
★★★✰✰ Violence lurks in every corner of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, from supernatural malevolence to visceral carnage. Mark Bruce’s new take on the production taps into classic horror tropes to animate this force...
★★★✰✰ Ben Duke's speciality, in the works he devises for Lost Dog, the company he founded in 2004 with Raquel Meseguer, is conflating high art with low life – epic literature with everyday banalities.
★★★✰✰ The return of Christopher Wheeldon's The Winter's Tale in its third revival since 2014 brings newcomers to its many meaty roles. It also introduces new audience members to one of Shakespeare's late plays, with its convoluted plot.
★★★★✰ Choreographed by Nol Simonse, in collaboration with Christy Funsch, and performed by the incomparable pair, a myriad of ideas and themes were at play during the sixty-minute work. But one concept was particularly striking: time.