Royal Ballet
Balanchine: Three Signature Works, Royal Ballet review - exuberant, joyful, exhilaratingTuesday, 01 April 2025
Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching.... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet review - Shakespeare without the words, with music to die forThursday, 20 March 2025
1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the... Read more... |
Light of Passage, Royal Ballet review - Crystal Pite’s cosmic triptych powers backFriday, 21 February 2025
“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its... Read more... |
Phaedra + Minotaur, Royal Ballet and Opera, Linbury Theatre review - a double dose of Greek mythMonday, 10 February 2025
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first... Read more... |
Onegin, Royal Ballet review - a poignant lesson about the perils of youthTuesday, 04 February 2025
It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under... Read more... |
Cinderella, Royal Ballet review - inspiring dancing, but not quite casting the desired spellMonday, 09 December 2024
Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella? Prokofiev’s two great scores have provided the Royal Ballet with a pair of popular hits, though Macmillan’s R&J has probably been the bigger draw, its Capulets ball music sampled everywhere from TV commercials to... Read more... |
Maddaddam, Royal Ballet review - superb dancing in a confusing frameSaturday, 16 November 2024
Valiant souls who have recently read the Margaret Atwood trilogy on which this new Wayne McGregor piece for the Royal Ballet is based will be at home with its time-shifting eco-sci-fi narrative. The rest of us, not so much.The appeal of the basic... Read more... |
Encounters, Royal Ballet review - exciting mixed bill with a gem of a premiereThursday, 24 October 2024
In 2022, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz made a duet on Royal Ballet principals William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan, which they performed at the company’s Diamond Celebration. That piece has now evolved into a true gem.Or Forevermore... Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Royal Ballet review - big, bold and ultimately brashWednesday, 02 October 2024
In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed... Read more... |
Ashton Celebrated, Royal Ballet review - peerless delights from the master step-smithMonday, 17 June 2024
Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet... Read more... |
The Winter's Tale, Royal Ballet review - what a story, and what a way to tell it!Saturday, 11 May 2024
If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it. The Winter’s Tale, originally a “romance” in five acts, is widely regarded as a problem play, not only... Read more... |
MacMillan Celebrated, Royal Ballet review - out of mothballs, three vintage works to marvel atSaturday, 06 April 2024
Triple bills can be a difficult sell for ballet companies. Audiences prefer big sets and costumes, and a storyline they can hum. It’s not hard to see why Kenneth MacMillan’s full-evening hits Romeo and Juliet and Manon have turned out to be such a... Read more... |
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