Haglund's Heel

Bocca to resign from Sodre Ballet in 2018; Maria Riccetto's name being floated as his replacement

This is big, big, big news from Uruguay's El Pais.

The Minister of Education and Culture, Maria Julia Muñoz, confirmed in Parliament the resignation of Julio Bocca as director of the Ballet Nacional del Sodre. El Pais also contacted the president of the Sodre Board of Directors, Doreen Ibarra, to inquire about the differing versions of the resignation that had been communicated throughout the day. The chief explained that Bocca will cease to be the artistic director from 2018, clarifying that he will continue to be linked to the institution as a "resident teacher or supervisor".

El Pais quotes Telemundo as saying Muñoz told them that she recommended Maria Riccetto as Julio's replacement.

Oh Lord, we need Julio in New York. Come on, Julio ...

If ABT's board has so much as an ounce of brains spread among its members, they will do whatever needs to be done to sign Julio before somebody else does (like San Francisco Ballet or some other company with a director who may be close to retirement).

How much worse do things have to get before the board will pull the trigger and make a change? Look at this pitiful fall season. It is among the worst ever presented, and it will, perhaps appropriately, serve to "celebrate" McKenzie's 25th anniversary. What next? Will McKenzie lose two, three, or four weeks of future spring Met Seasons and then claim that it was all part of his genius plan? Enough is enough. Throw this bum out the door and bring in Julio. There is no reason whatsoever to show any mercy to McKenzie. He should have left more than a dozen years ago but has become entrenched like a tick under a dog's skin.

 

observations 8-28

So sorry to have read the report this morning that flood waters are swirling over the main stages of the Wortham Theater Center in Houston where Houston Ballet was set to open a terrific season in about 10 days. Reportedly the basement is filled with water and all the generators have been turned off. Consequently, the website is down, too.

Haglund had plans to go down for performances of Mayerling later in September. It doesn't look promising now.

If HB has to cancel its upcoming performances, we should invite as many of the dancers as possible to come up and perform during ABT's season. In fact, it could save ABT's season if the rep were changed to include Symphony in C which HB planned to perform in 10 days. We've got plenty of costumes AND Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg will have Symphony in C fresh in their bloodstreams having just performed it in Australia. Also, ABT could dump one or two of the Millepied and Lang pieces in order to insert Symphony in C and also Stanton Welch's Clear - really, who at HB or ABT doesn't know his ballet by heart. Seriously, they all could rehearse it by email.

We hope everyone is safe down there.

 

The Dog Days of Summer

Well, sort of…

 

 

Ballet tends to shut down here during August; so, we’ve been filling our time by getting an early start on our Christmas cards, hanging out on the street down by the Trump Tower with a few thousand friends, dropping in on the museums, and seeing some theater.

 

We previously mentioned the brilliant performance of Tony Yazbeck in Prince of Broadway - he’ll be a clear favorite for a Tony. Try to see this show before the prices skyrocket. Seventeen musicals in one – every minute is heavenly. Coming up this October at the Cort Theatre is a revival of David Henry Hwang’s M.Butterfly with Clive Owen reprising the role originated by John Lithgow almost thirty years ago. Julie Taymor will direct. The choreographer will be Ma Cong who has been associated with Tulsa Ballet for 18 years as a leading dancer and now the company’s resident choreographer. He has created works for the Joffrey Ballet, Houston Ballet, Queensland Ballet of Australia, National Ballet of China, and several other companies. At the moment, deeply discounted tickets ($29 - $99) are available at telechargeoffers.com with the code MBMAIL718. You may want to grab a ticket for the second half of October rather than sleeping through ABT at the Koch Theater.

 

Instead of the fall season, they should call it ABT’s poverty season. It doesn’t matter who is cast, the works are mostly worthless drivel. Poor Frederick Ashton is not strong enough to hold this season up with his little Symphonic Variations. What a stroke of genius – not – by the marketing department to feature as the symbol of the season on its brochures and advertising the worst failure of the 2014 fall season – a tasteless piece of trash that helped start contributions and revenue plummeting the following year. While looking at the aggression displayed in the picture of James Whiteside and Misty Copeland as he angrily hauls the worried little Misty in her provocative costume on his back, we haven’t been able to remember whether this moment in the choreography occurred before or after Whiteside crouched down in front of Copeland, grabbed her tits, and furiously bounced them up and down. Good work, ABT. Fortunately, it appears that we won’t be subject to that “art” again, just the oh-so-sensitive pas de deux by two different dancers which the choreographer assembled with scraps from other works he made for other companies. But ABT is still trying to remind us of the violence of the piece to encourage us to buy tickets. What are these people? Morons? Truly, they all must be morons. 

 

But don’t worry. The Mariinsky Ballet and Pennsylvania Ballet will offer us the opportunity to celebrate holy communion in the memory of Petipa as we reflect on his genius and pray for his return. Angel Corella's new Sleeping Beauty at Pennsylvania Ballet will be performed from October 12th - 22nd. Single tickets aren’t on sale yet, but they will be soon. Mariinsky’s La Bayadere will be at the Kennedy Center from October 17th - 22nd. Pass the wine chalice and wafers, and let us bond and pray together.

 

Speaking of the Kennedy Center, it looks like this year’s honoree Carmen de Lavallade will refuse to visit the White House in December. Norman Lear won’t go either. Gloria Estefan plans to attend because the show about her on Broadway will close this Sunday and most everyone will then forget about her. Maybe she’ll change her mind and join the protest or maybe the entire event will be cancelled.

 

And speaking of protests, an important new exhibit opened last week at the Whitney Museum: An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017.  Incomplete, for sure, but there is a lot there worth remembering, or for many, worth seeing for the first time. The art posters created in response to the Vietnam conflict, mostly anonymously, had dramatic impact on the country’s conscience and were ever present in the nationwide – and frequently violent – protests which pressured the government to end the war. 

 

 

 

And a new piece:

 

 

 

 

observations 8-7.1

This is a shame.

There's no doubt about the challenges of raising kids these days. It's almost a 24/7 job trying to keep track of them and keep them on the right road. We're now in a time when the odds are actually stacked against parents for succeeding.

This sort of thing happens to a lot of parents. But when the parents are high profile, it tends to look unexpectedly ugly.

We probably won't be accepting any comments on this.

 

observations 8-7

Singing in front of the watermelons isn't such a bad gig.

Here in Hell's Kitchen we're always trying to preserve and restore the small town charm of Manhattan. Our new village farm stand on 10th Ave at 44th, Farmacy, delighted the local yokels on Sunday with a 3-piece band of entertainers who strummed and hummed while patrons picked through the peppers. Meanwhile, over on the East Side at the Lexington Avenue street fair, they were serving up Deep Fried Oreos - which were figuratively and literally to die for. Can't have 'em without powdered sugar, neither.

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Q: How far does an ABT dancer have to travel to dance a meaty piece of Balanchine?

A: To the other side of the earth.

David Hallberg and Gillian Murphy are going to Australia for the opportunity to dance a movement in Balanchine's Symphony in C. Our friends Down Under will have the opportunity to see Hallberg a half dozen times and Murphy in eight performances with The Australian Ballet from August 25th to September 2nd.

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Here's an interesting opinion piece about the Kennedy Center abandoning the classical arts in order to grovel to pop culture in its annual Honors.  Observer-Reporter  KC's main criteria for honorees seems to be who will draw a typical low-brow TV audience. They should just skip the TV broadcast altogether and try to recover some of the award's integrity. From the article:

He notes no one from the worlds of opera, classical music or ballet were honored this year. Carmen de Lavallande, an 86-year-old choreographer, will be the sole representative of the traditional arts. A whole range of artists who have made significant contributions but who have never taken an album to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, from playwright Tony Kushner to composer Philip Glass, and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, have gone without Kennedy Center Honors.

Congratulations, Mr. LL Cool J, on your John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Award for your "lifetime of contributions". We wonder which of your lyrics Caroline Kennedy likes the best and sang to her kids in order to inspire them to love the arts.

 

observations 8-4

We were surprised to see Craig Salstein’s bio disappear from the ABT website yesterday. We had heard (unconfirmed) that he was going to take a leave to be the Dance Captain for the Broadway revival of Carousel — “choreographed” by Justin Peck (i.e., Take Agnes De Mille’s choreography to the right and set it going left and then claim it's original; take Agnes De Mille’s choreography and add a triple pirouette and then claim it's original; change the arms to Agnes De Mille’s footwork and then claim it’s original; and on and on. Just our prediction.) So, it seems that Craig has made a clean break. We can’t blame him.

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Meanwhile, ABT purged Veronika Part from the website but Kochetkova remains. For what reason?! This dancer offers n-o-t-h-i-n-g to ABT’s audiences that its own dancers cannot. Does McKenzie really believe that Sarah Lane, Skylar Brandt, and Cassandra Trenary are not better suited to dance with Herman Cornejo and Daniil Simkin than Kochetkova? If he does, Ratmansky has proven him wrong countless times by pairing them up in difficult choreography. ABT doesn’t need Kochetkova, and the ABT audiences have proven that they don’t want her and that she is not any kind of a ticket draw. Isn’t Helgi paying her enough to get by at San Francisco Ballet? Isn’t she earning enough pin money from her official guest artist designation at ENB? ABT’s audiences have no interest whatsoever in seeing Kochetkova in anything and resent how she pandered her way into the company. Even giving her one solitary Don Q will mean that this brilliance will not burn as brightly as it could:

 

 And by the way, welcome back Luis Ribagorda!

 

We’d like to see some similar clips of Skylar and Cassandra working hard in advance on Don Q variations - even if they haven’t yet been cast. We need ABT to reclaim its title to this ballet which McKenzie carelessly threw away by employing guest artists and imports like Kochetkova instead of developing the company’s own dancers. Skylar and Cassandra along with Sarah, Shevchenko and Teuscher are going to bring the title home for us. Fans out, ladies. Let’s go let’s go let’s go.

 

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In case anyone had a doubt, withholding money from ABT as punishment for its crappy behavior WORKS.

 

ABT recently published its 2015 IRS Form 990 which confirms that patrons were fed-up royally at the company’s reliance on guest artists and the nonstop nonsense that Misty Copeland was spewing to gain her celebrity status. CONTRIBUTIONS FOR 2015 DECLINED BY MORE THAN 28%. Program service revenues (e.g. ticket sales) were down as well – even with the ridiculous increases in prices. No wonder Rachel Moore bailed out at the end of the year; her Star Strategy and all of her other crappy strategies (e.g., Force Misty Down Everyone's Throats) were sending ABT’s finances into the toilet. For the same period, New York City Ballet's contributions increased by more than 8% and their program service revenues increased a whopping 31%. 

 

 

We repeat: Withholding money from ABT WORKS. We now have far more in-house principals than we would have had and much less reliance on guest artists. But our job is far from done. We need to get rid of both Kochetkova (and all other freelancing faux principals) and McKenzie. We need Veronika back as well as Yuriko and Jared. We need a commitment from ABT to NEVER EVER again treat an artist in the shameful, despicable, ungrateful manner that Kevin McKenzie was allowed to use to harm Veronika Part. EVER.

 

Withhold money from ABT. Buy fewer tickets. Find something else to do with your money. Here’s a suggestion:

 

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Last night Haglund went to the premiere performance of Prince on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 47th Street. What a stunning evening of entertainment. It was a revue of Hal Prince’s musicals — directed by Prince, of course. There was no “book” per se, simply a thin narrative thread about Prince’s history in the theater. Every number was taken out of context, but they all worked wonderfully. Within 30 seconds of each song, it felt as though you had been in the theater the whole night for that particular musical.

 

Most of the cast, all mature and well-known musical theater artists, had never been in a Prince musical on Broadway. They were f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c !!! You simply will not believe the brilliance of Tony Yazbeck in Damn Yankees, West Side Story, as Leo Frank in “This Is Not Over Yet” from Parade, and especially his dancing/singing/drama skills in “The Right Girl” from Follies. And OMG, Chuck Cooper as Tevye singing “If I Were A Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof and later singing "Ol’ Man River” from Show Boat – he and Yazbeck will probably secure Broadway revivals for all of these shows by themselves.

 

Brandon Uranowitz as the emcee in Cabaret with Bryonha Marie Parham as Sally Bowles, Michael Xavier and Kaley Ann Voorhees in an excerpt from Phantom of the Opera, Karen Ziemba in Sweeney Todd, Janet Dacal in Evita, and Emily Skinner singing “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music made for a full evening of sighs and wonderful memories among the audience members.

 

Bravo to Manhattan Theatre Club for this production. Everyone go see this show!