Archive for February, 2010
Last-minute romance
Posted by: | CommentsNo video is yet available of Ballet Arizona’s Sleeping Beauty. Above, to give a taste of the company’s excellence: Natalia Magnicaballi in Ballet Arizona’s La Sylphide a few years back.
I’ll let the print media tell you, as I assume they will, about Ballet Arizona’s lush and energetic production of The Sleeping Beauty; about how Ginger Smith danced Aurora Thursday night like a sunbeam lighting up a landscape; about Roman Zavarov’s astonishing knack for staying aloft at the exact height of a jump; about how Natalia Magnicaballi’s Lilac Fairy owned the stage at Symphony Hall by dint of her seemingly easy musicality and presence. Certainly they’ll tell you that, and if they don’t, well, I just did.
That’s the good news: Phoenix has a production of this treasured, damned-difficult-to-produce ballet to rival that of any city our size and a good many considerably bigger.
The bad news: You waited too long to get those ever-so-romantic tickets to the Valentine’s Day performance of The Sleeping Beauty and now it’s SOLD OUT! (You might be able to catch a couple tickets for the performance tonight, Feb. 13.)
Luckily for you, there are about a gazillion other Valentine’s Day-appropriate events where you can take your sweetie to curry the intimacy you so desire. Okay, Sleeping Beauty would have been No. 1 to that end, but you blew it, so make the best of your situation and choose from the following:
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change (Mesa)
The title says it all. This Off-Broadway musical hit explores the craziness of relationships, ca. Now. The Valley perennial is in its fourth production.
Gypsy (Peoria)
There’s life in the old girl, and more romance than you might recall if all you know is the movie version. Oh yeah, and there’s stripping – not exactly romantic, but in the right direction.
Madama Butterfly (downtown Phoenix)
If tragic love somehow fulfills your emotional need and gets her or him in the right mood, you can’t do better than Puccini’s classic about love to die for.
The Play About the Naked Guy (Phoenix)
Here’s a wild card: Stray Cat’s production of a play that pits commerce against art. Commerce wins, I guess, since the play is marketed partly on the basis of the very nudity-as-sales-device it satirizes. Not your traditional Valentine’s Day date, but who said we have to be traditional?
She hasn’t been kissed in a hundred years…
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A scene from Ballet Arizona’s production of The Sleeping Beauty. (Photo by Tim Fuller)
Everyone knows Nutcracker, and everybody at least knows about Swan Lake.
But Tchaikovsky composed three full-length ballet scores and it’s the least-known, Sleeping Beauty, that many balletomanes count as his greatest.
“It’s less often done than the other Tchaikovsky ballets because of the number of people you have to put onstage,” says Maria Simonetti, rehearsal director for Ballet Arizona. Ballet Arizona’s production of Sleeping Beauty plays Feb. 11 -14, with Tchaikovsky’s music performed live by The Phoenix Symphony.
Simonetti’s job is to coordinate the activities of everyone involved in the mammoth production. She plans rehearsals for the 40 dancers, apprentices and trainees of Ballet Arizona, and if a dancer needs to be called out for a costume fitting or a press interview, Simonetti schedules it.
She doesn’t get much sleep doing her job for this ballet.
“We have 26 little children, 30 teenagers and 40 company dancers in Sleeping Beauty. Some of them have as many as five costume changes,” Simonetti says.
The story of Sleeping Beauty follows the famous fairytale, in which an envious witch puts a beautiful princess under a spell. The princess pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and falls into a deep sleep. Only “love’s true kiss” can awaken her – and that takes 100 years to arrive. The music was used as the basis for the score to Disney’s animated feature of the same name.
The 100-year wait poses a challenge for productions of Sleeeping Beauty, Simonetti says. Since a century has gone by when the princess awakes, all the costumes and wigs on the cast have to be different from the ones before.
Another part of Simonetti’s job is observing the rehearsals run by company artistic director Ib Andersen. She notes Andersen’s choreography and corrections, and helps ensure continuity in future rehearsals and performances. As she puts it:
“I work to make sure the dancers are moving the same feet, the same arms” from one time to the next.
A native of Buenos Aires, Simonetti was trained there at the fabled Teatro Colon and worked as ballet mistress for Chicago’s Hubbard Street Theatre before joining Ballet Arizona in 1997. In the year 2000, the company near extinction, Andersen came aboard as artistic director. Simonetti became his right hand in rebuilding Ballet Arizona into a viable company, and one of high artistic quality.
“I’ve been working for Ib for ten years now,” she says. “He’s a great artist to work for as well as a great boss.”
That the company can stage all three Tchaikovsky ballets in a single season – Swan Lake and Nutcracker came earlier in the year – is tribute to Andersen’s vision, the dancers’ talent, and to the persistent striving of Ballet Arizona’s board, staff and administration.
Dynamic…and then some
Posted by: | CommentsLeila Josefowicz plays the final movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1
There are violinists who effect a natural cool – the name Hilary Hahn comes to mind – and then there are violinists like the Canadian winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, Leila Josefowicz, seen above playing some Bruch. One way is not right and the other wrong; they are simply two opposing ways of conforming the body to the experience of musical expression.
Josefowicz will perform in recital tonight, Friday, Feb. 5 at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts.
Of awesomeness, geeks, and breaking the mold
Posted by: | CommentsJason Robert Brown sings “Being a Geek” from 13
Not many casts of musicals get kudos from the guy who wrote the songs. But on Sunday night, Jason Robert Brown pronounced the Valley Youth Theatre production of his show, 13, to be “awesome.”
“I see many productions of 13 around the country,” Brown went on to qualify, “and not a lot of them are awesome.”
I saw VYT’s 13 opening night, and I have to agree with its songwriter.
Brown was in Phoenix at the invitation of Valley Youth Theatre artistic director Bobb Cooper, who smartly decided to mount the Arizona premiere of this dazzling show about coming into adolescence, despite the fact that the original Broadway production closed in 2009 after only a brief run. Go figure.
13 tells the story of 12-year-old Evan Goldman, whose happy life in New York is disrupted by divorce. He suddenly finds himself in Indiana, where he is forced to confront his own sense of worth in the face of cliques and peer pressure. The song “Being a Geek,” sung above by Brown in a YouTube clip, sort of sums it up.
Brown not only attend the opening, but gave a concert of his songs Sunday at the Herberger, performing numbers from 13, Parade, Songs for a New World and a show that must qualify as one of the best and most original musicals all time, The Last Five Years. I confronted Brown backstage after the concert with the words, “Broadway songwriters are not supposed to be terrific singers, pianists and entertainers,” to which he shrugged and modestly replied, “I broke the mold.”
13 runs through Feb. 13.
