Could do better
by John Percival
How happy we were when Monica Mason announced that the Royal Ballet, to
celebrate its 75th birthday, would mount a new production of "The Sleeping
Beauty" trying to restore the qualities that won the company national and
international fame. More than any of the other old Russian classics, it
was "Beauty", together with our distinctive Ashton ballets, that set the
company style. And the version premiered in 1946 for the move to Covent
Garden Opera House remains, together with the Kirov's recent attempt to
approximate Petipa's original, the supreme exposition of what this great
ballet is really about. READ MORE
American Ballet Theatre's opening night gala served up a generous selection of bravura showpieces and concert numbers, but it was the evening’s third offering that got the well-heeled audience officially into the gala spirit. “Le Corsaire Suite,” a hodge-podge assemblage of highlights for five of that ballet’s main characters, made no logical sense, but its seven sections featured a nonstop showcase of flashy, exciting virtuoso dancing, and that’s what people expect on an evening like this. 
The days that ballerinas like Virginia Zucchi, Carlotta Brianza, and Pierina Legnani, groomed at La Scala in Milan, conquered Russian and European audiences and triumphed in the Marius Petipa classics belong to the past. Ironically, when La Scala now programs La Bayadère, French and Russian ballerinas are setting the standard. Last May, the Bolshoi’s Svetlana Zakharova returned to La Scala as a guest star to dance Nikiya in Natalia Makarova’s production. Zakharova ended up by dancing six out of the nine Bayadères in this run (what happened to the local ballerinas?) — and she took the Milanese audiences by storm.