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American Ballet Theatre.

Article Excerpt
Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NYC May 14-July 7, 2007

It was a strange and mixed season--often with excellent dancing pursuing mediocre stagings. It accentuated an age-old problem with American Ballet Theatre. So frequently the performers seem almost on a different plane from what they are required to perform, with dancers exultant and choreographic mediocrity rampant. This whole eight-week season offered, outside of the current repertoire, only one, admittedly large-scale, new production, The Sleeping Beauty, and one major revival, Lar Lubovitch's full-evening Othello. There was also one major and very sad departure, that of the gorgeously tremulous Alessandra Ferri.

Over the years ABT has given three productions of the Petipa/Tchaikovsky classic The Sleeping Beauty, and this third was unfortunately, by a wide margin and on every count, the worst. Third time unlucky, you might say. Both of the two earlier productions--Mary Skeaping's in 1976 with a muzzy reproduction of Oliver Messel's 1946 designs for The Royal...

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