Performing Arts

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

Simon Callow

Shape-Shifters

In The Method Isaac Butler traces the evolution of an acting theory that was both ferociously denounced and fanatically embraced.

August 18, 2022 issue

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue

Daniel M. Lavery

Lea’s Turn

Passed over for years to fill Barbra Streisand’s quintessential role, Lea Michele finally justifies a Broadway revival of Funny Girl.

October 27, 2022

Rachel Eisendrath

I Killed a Man Back There

If, as Hamlet claims, every play holds a “mirror up to nature,” what kind of mirror is Robert Icke’s production?

August 10, 2022

The festival of the Misteri d’Elx in the Basilica de Santa María, Elche, Spain, 2015

Stephen Greenblatt

Witness to a Mystery

June 11, 2020 issue

Mikhail Baryshnikov as Benedict XVI and Kaspars Znotiņš as Georg Gänswein in The White Helicopter at the New Riga Theater

Joan Acocella

The Red Shoes

Mikhail Baryshnikov has never played so undashing a hero.

May 14, 2020 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Opera at the Edge

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

May 14, 2020 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

Dancers of the New York City Ballet performing George Balanchine’s Serenade at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, Russia, July 2003

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

Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

February 9, 2023 issue

Victoria Baena

A Great Variety of Selves

In a new play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Emma Corrin plays a young aristocrat who swaps milieus, costumes, countries, and genders.

January 10, 2023

Alastair Macaulay

The Encyclopedia of the Dance

The first full-length biography of Bronislava Nijinska does long-overdue justice to one of the twentieth century’s great women artists.

January 19, 2023 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Save the ENO!

The Arts Council’s decision to cut off annual funding for the English National Opera and other flagship London arts institutions will be devastating for audiences and artists.

December 27, 2022

Hannah Gold

Depth Chargers

In Denis Johnson’s last and most desperate play, five characters converge on an Iowa kitchen for a marathon drinking session.

December 24, 2022

Laura Quinton

Ghosts at the Feast

Two recent performances showcase Frederick Ashton’s “English style” of ballet—a sensibility inspired by old, aristocratic worlds.

December 16, 2022

Simon Callow

Ol’ Blue Eyes

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is a many-sided self-interrogation by a man who was a mystery to himself.

December 22, 2022 issue

Tiana Reid

‘I Was Mobile’

In her photographs of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977, Marilyn Nance captured moments of reprieve amid the spectacle.

November 4, 2022

J. Hoberman

Fuzz! Junk! Rumble!

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

October 10, 2022