Word: balletically
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...premier dance companies of the nation, the Boston Ballet nevertheless suffers from a preponderance of style over substance, evident in its most recent lavish dance spectacles. In the 1998 season, audiences were treated to a special-effects laden production of Dracula, followed by this year's equally extravagant The Princess and the Pea. The Nutcracker, now in its 34th annual rendition, is no exception to this bigger and better mentality. Boasting oversized sets and props, more than a ton of white confetti and a cast of over 400, "lavish" would be an understatement...
...lush as Dr. Zhivago on film. The degree of unity that Yeremin orchestrates on a sensory level is downright astonishing. Scott Bradley's sets are a work of art in themselves, something of a cross between installation art and Isamu Noguchi's minimalist sets for the New York City Ballet. Add to that the light design of John Ambrosone, for whom no slant of light or subtlety of shading is unattainable, and the stoic formalism of Catherine Zuber's costumes, which make Chekov's rural social philosophers seem as though they could just melt into the landscape, and you have...
Farrell was a star long before any of her dancers were born. She gave more than 2,000 performances with the New York City Ballet before retiring from the stage in 1989, and in the process inspired such ballets as Balanchine's Diamonds, Chaconne and Mozartiana and Robbins' In Memory of... and won international renown as a ballerina of unique virtuosity, at once lyrical and daring. But even though she has staged Balanchine's works for such companies as the Paris Opera Ballet and St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet, this is the first time she has taken her own group...
...balletomanes have much more to cheer about than Meditation. Farrell's painstaking stagings are to a run-of-the-mill City Ballet performance as a freshly cleaned Old Master canvas is to a fuzzy reproduction. Steps you took for granted--or never really saw before--now stand out in high relief, unexaggerated yet breathtakingly clear and stylish. Most memorable of all are excerpts from Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, a notoriously difficult dance whose intricate patterns have rarely been realized with such crystalline simplicity...
Farrell is far from the first ex-City Ballet dancer to knock the rust of routine off Balanchine's ballets. Edward Villella's marvelous Miami City Ballet recently gave a performance of Prodigal Son at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark that all but exploded off the stage, and Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet, led by Francia Russell and Kent Stowell, has just mounted a Midsummer Night's Dream that is causing coast-to-coast buzz. But Farrell's ad hoc troupe, whipped into shape with just three weeks of intensive rehearsal, is already impressive enough to suggest...