Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s new “Canadianized” Nutcracker has audiences jumping to their feet to cheer. Some critics, on the other hand… – Toronto Globe and Mail
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A STRANGER’S TASTE
Siobhan Davies was given four weeks to create an opening piece for the Royal Ballet’s reentry to Covent Garden. “While the Royal Ballet is badly in need of new ideas and fresh choreography, Davies was a strange choice. Barefoot, weighted and understated, her choreography is a wriggly, dense, slippery kind of calligraphy in which the entire body seems to slither in a constant motion that you can never quite freeze in your head.” – London Telegraph
MOVIE MARKUP
“Slowly, with inevitable exceptions, 1999 has emerged a landmark year for good movies. Maybe it’s millennial, maybe not, but we’re seeing more vitality, more inventiveness, more intellectual enterprise than at any other time since the 1970s.” San Francisco Chronicle
VAN GOGHS TO PICASSOS
Last month’s sky-high prices at New York art auctions are on everyone’s minds going into this week’s London sales. London Telegraph
KENNEDY CENTER AWARDS
Lives in the arts celebrated Sunday in Washington DC. New York Times
A FAILURE ON ALL POSSIBLE TERMS
An updated “Messiah for the Millennium” is a bust. “…the dreadful Roger Daltrey” butchered everything. “Chaka Khan was all over the place. Gladys Knight was just not equipped to sing this music. All this was peppered with the offensively ambiguous double-speak of narrator Aidan Quinn’s pointless role. Was he scorning or supporting Handel’s Messiah story? Who could tell?” – Irish Times
AIDA ODYSSEY
Tryout reviews were nasty and the album crashed and burned. Disney’s betting again on the Elton John/Tim Rice remake of “Aida” before show heads to Broadway. BBC
And: A long way from Verdi. Los Angeles Times 12/5/99
IN OUR OWN IMAGE
The century’s dominant art form? The movies of course, though sprockets and celluloid are on the fast track to extinction. Boston Globe
ART ON TRIAL
Chinese scroll at the Metropolitan Museum is accused of being fake. Now a trial to decide. If real, the Met will own one of the most important Chinese paintings in any collection. New York Times
MILLENNIA MYTHS
Enough with the millennium already. Most people can’t even spell it. And then there are all these books rooting around for some way to make sense of….what? Evening Standard