Arts

Performing Arts

Grand Opera’s Tribulations

This season’s production of Aida at the Met sheds light on issues facing both the company and the genre of grand opera itself.

May 29, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Eddying Toward Doom

Any adaptation of Moby-Dick must pick and choose from the novel’s many themes and tones; Jake Heggie’s opera tends toward a frequency attuned to sorrow.

May 15, 2025 issue

Jed Perl

Echoes of Eternity

The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.

March 27, 2025 issue

Blair McClendon

It’s Technicolor

Alvin Ailey is one of those artists, like Picasso and Faulkner, whose name is shorthand for a whole field.

February 13, 2025 issue

James Shapiro

Rebels Without a Cause

In Sam Gold’s Romeo + Juliet, the lovers’ headlong rush into marriage is in tension throughout with the surprising regression to childhood that characterizes so much of the production.

January 16, 2025 issue

Sarah L. Kaufman

Limitless Space, Endless Motion

When the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky first saw a tape of Balanchine’s Apollo, he watched in disbelief. Here was elegance without exaggeration, tension and beauty without stagy excess.

January 16, 2025 issue

Simon Callow

Under the Spotlight

Richard Sennett’s new book, The Performer, ranges beyond acting to musical, political, social, and pictorial performance.

October 17, 2024 issue

Brian Seibert

‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, once kings of American culture, invented a new kind of musical theater in shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But by the time of their final work together, a critical backlash had begun.

June 20, 2024 issue

On Dance

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

A scene in the Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadère, 1900; from Marius Petipa: La Dansomanie, a two-volume album in three languages published last year by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Music to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Petipa’s birth

Joan Acocella

Souls in Single File

On Marius Petipa, the most productive and influential ballet choreographer of the late nineteenth century.

December 19, 2019 issue

Jennifer Homans

Hail Balanchine

‘Serenade’ has no story or narrative. It is internal—inward, like the music, and more of a prayer or ritual than a theatrical spectacle.

December 21, 2017 issue

Larry Wolff

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality.

May 10, 2025

Nathan Shields

‘Every Carnival Has Its End’

A recent performance by the Santa Fe Opera of Don Giovanni showed what is gained—and what is lost—in demystifying its demon protagonist.

January 12, 2025

Hannah Gold

Mama Tried

In Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold On to Me Darling, newly revived with Adam Driver, a country star looks back on his wasted years.

December 8, 2024

Nate Wooley

Eastern Sounds

Ahmed Abdul-Malik recorded six overlooked albums combining jazz and North African folk music. A new European quartet has revived his legacy to create a new music of their own.

October 6, 2024

Brian Seibert

‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’

For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time.

August 21, 2024

Dilara O’Neil

Dancing Laser Beams

George Balanchine’s Rubies represents New York City Ballet’s centrality to American dance, and American dance’s centrality to the art form.

July 17, 2024

Jennifer Krasinski

Taking the Performance Apart

A retrospective of the artist Joan Jonas displays her will of steel, her porosity before the world, and her ways of playing with perception.

June 30, 2024

Hannah Gold

Second Hand News

In David Adjmi’s new play, a fictional Seventies rock band struggles with life and art.

May 18, 2024

Fintan O’Toole

The Whistleblower We Deserve

The ambiguous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is a man of science who insists on the primacy of truth and evidence. But he’s also, possibly, a bit of a fascist.

May 23, 2024 issue