This Friday and Saturday (November 29-30), the ballet troupe of the brand new State Primorsky Opera and Ballet Theater will present its first performances in the beautiful arts complex that opened less than a month ago in Vladivostok, Russia. Our own Joseph Phillips (Джозеф Филлипс) is a charter Principal Dancer with the company and will be performing both nights.
The program will include selections from Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, The Flames of Paris, Le Corsaire, Don Quixote, La Sylphide, Harlequinade, and more. The theater's artistic director and chief conductor, Anton Lubchenko, and the ballet's director, Aidar Akhmetov, want to give the residents of Vladivostok a crash course in the classics, because the area has seen so little in the way of ballet performances.
Hopefully, we'll be able to find some pictures from the performances, because this type of programing and our Phillips are going to register on the Richter Scale this weekend.
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Also on November 29th and 30th, the Ho Chi Mihn City Ballet, Symphony Orchestra and Opera (aka HBSO) in Vietnam will perform The Nutcracker in the HCM City opera house where tickets start at about $19 and the median income in the city for a middle income call center employee is about $408 per month. The next time Haglund speaks with one of them, which seems to be with evergrowing frequency, he will quiz them extensively and assertively – perhaps even annoyingly – about their Nutcracker production.
By the way, Ho Chi Mihn City is building a brand new 1,700 seat theater for the HBSO to be completed in two years, which coincidently will be the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. There was a noisy controversy about ripping up the city park in the center of town to build it, but at a HCM City People's Committee hearing, the artists and cultural activists won out over the objections of urban development experts and residents of the surrounding highrise towers who wanted to preserve the green space. Love it.
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Closer to home, Francis Patrelle's Yorkville Nutcracker will be presented at the Kaye Playhouse at East 68th Street and Park Avenue from December 5 through December 8. The theme of this production is Olde New York, and it is one of the most charming and beloved Nutcrackers in the city. NYCB's Jenifer Ringer will be the Sugar Plum Fairy and Jared Angle will be Her Cavalier. While the children in the production come from professional schools all over the city, many hail from the Ballet Academy East, a particularly fine school with high standards but a lower profile.
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