Opera House captures Boston Ballet’s heart
By JEFFREY GANTZ | April 2, 2008
A DRAMATIC LEAP: The Boston Ballet’s decision to leave the Citi Performing Arts Center for the Opera House is headline news within the performing-arts community. |
Media watch
The world of dance criticism has likewise been in turmoil. In February, Boston Herald dance writer Theodore Bale announced he was leaving the paper after it had refused to let him review Alvin Ailey or Bill T. Jones and was hedging on Boston Ballet’s Romeo & Juliet. And this past week, the Village Voice sent Deborah Jowitt, for four decades one of dance writing’s most authoritative voices, packing. The Voice will, it appears, fill her space with freelance copy. Boston Ballet 2008–2009
Boston Ballet has just announced its 2008–2009 season, with The Sleeping Beauty, James Kudelka’s Cinderella, a Jirí Kylián program, a Ballets Russes program, and George Balanchine’s evening-length Jewels — arguably the most important ballet creation of the past 50 years. All productions save for The Nutcracker will be at the Wang Theatre. Here’s the line-up: CINDERELLA [James Kudelka] | October 16–26
THE NUTCRACKER | November 28–December 27
“BLACK AND WHITE”: Jirí Kylián’s Petite Mort, No More Play, Sarabande, Falling Angels, and Six Dances | February 12–15
JEWELS [George Balanchine] | February 26–March 8
THE SLEEPING BEAUTY | April 23–May 3
“DIAGHILEV’S BALLETS RUSSES CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION”: The Prodigal Son [George Balanchine], The Afternoon of a Faun [Vaslav Nijinsky], Le Spectre de la Rose [Michel Fokine], Le Sacre du Printemps [Jorma Elo] | May 14–17 |
It’s been a roller-coaster six weeks at Boston Ballet. Back on Valentine’s Day, as the company opened its production of John Cranko’s Romeo & Juliet, it was also making the decision to downsize. In early March, the Ballet announced that executive director Valerie Wilder would be leaving at the end of the season (“I am exploring a number of exciting opportunities in the nonprofit world”) and that artistic director Mikko Nissinen would serve as interim executive director while the company conducted the search for her replacement. A week later, Boston Ballet confirmed that it would be laying off nine dancers, reducing the troupe from 50 to 41. And this past Thursday, Nissinen revealed that, starting in 2009, the company will leave its home of the past 30 years, the 3600-seat Wang Theatre, for the 2500-seat Opera House. It’s not a short-term move, either: Boston Ballet has signed a 30-year agreement with Live Nation, which owns and operates the Opera House.
The rupture between Boston Ballet and the Citi Performing Arts Center — both nonprofits — opened in 2004, when the Citi Center, which operates both the Wang Theatre and the Shubert Theatre, notified the Ballet that it would not renew its contract for The Nutcracker. The company’s production of the Tchaikovsky holiday classic had been one of the world’s most attended (drawing upward of 140,000 each season) and most lucrative, but it wasn’t enough of a moneymaker for the Citi Center, which replaced it with The Radio City Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes in even-numbered years and Irving Berlin’sWhite Christmas in odd. Boston Ballet scrambled to redo The Nutcracker for the 1700-seat Colonial Theatre in 2004; in 2005, the production moved to the Opera House. The rest of the Ballet’s season — five productions filling eight weekends, with 42 performances — remained at the Wang. This year, after that contract expired and negotiations for a new one broke down (the Ballet wanted to move The Nutcracker back to the Wang; Citi declined), Boston Ballet decided to make the Opera House its home for all performances.
Related:
State of the art, Slideshow: Boston Ballet's Jewels, Brava Larissa!, More 
- State of the art
Maybe it’s the economy, but Boston Ballet’s third-annual season-opening gala was a sober evening, without the orchestral overture that graced the first two affairs.
- Slideshow: Boston Ballet's Jewels
Photos from George Balanchine's Jewels, performed by the Boston Ballet.
- Brava Larissa!
The end of an era loomed last night as Boston Ballet opened The Sleeping Beauty — what's likely to be the last story ballet ever to be staged at the Wang Theatre.
- Smaller, bigger, better
Is Boston in the midst of a ballet boom? You could certainly believe that if you attended Boston Ballet’s fourth annual season-opening gala last Saturday.
- Photos: Boston Ballet's World Passions
Photos of the Boston Ballet's "World Passions" collection, including Jorma Elo's Carmen ; Helen Pickett's Tsukiyo ; Viktor Plotnikov's Rhyme ; and Marius Petipa's Paquita.
- Definitions
Boston Ballet’s artistic director, Mikko Nissinen, wants us to think of his company as utterly contemporary, but it’s a tricky balance to pull off.
- Is it magic yet?
When you've seen every Boston Ballet Nutcracker for the past 20-odd years, and reviewed most of them, it can get a little hard to locate the magic. Then again, when you survey other Nutcracker s around the world you appreciate that there's no place like home, and not many that are as good.
- Photos: Boston Ballet presents Black & White (2010)
Boston Ballet's reprise of Jiří Kylián’s Black & White
- Here’s looking at you
Set in the usual small village — this one in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe — Coppélia might look like just another pleasant 19th-century ballet about a boy, a girl, and another girl. But appearances can be deceiving — and that’s theme of this work, whose title character is a life-size mechanical doll.
- The real deal
Nineteenth-century ballets are not all alike. But Boston Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is the real McCoy.
- Second sight
May in Boston has always been Storybook Ballet Month, as Boston Ballet finished off its season with Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty or Don Quixote , something classical and highbrow and reassuring. That, after all, is what Boston audiences want, right?
- Less
Topics:
Dance
, Entertainment, Music, Deborah Jowitt, More
, Entertainment, Music, Deborah Jowitt, Irving Berlin, John Cranko, Jonathan McPhee, Jorma Elo, Radio City Rockettes, Vaslav Nijinsky, Wang, Less
