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1 week ago | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
One sees why critics grapple with Turandot. The mythic elements are extremely potent and indeed transgressive in that they reverse the more usual pattern of eroticised violence by depicting a chaste female ruler as the ritual murderer of desirable (and desirous) males. It’s a form of violence occasioned by a rejection (not the indulgence) of eroticism, a rejection exacted by the rape of a female ancestor.
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1 month ago | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
I dance of arms and the man. Ludwig Minkus’ Don Quixote, choreographed by Anna-Marie Holmes and receiving its first performances here at the Kansas City Ballet is a perfect paraphrase of Virgil’s celebrated lines. From the transparent curtain depicting plated armor at the opening in a messy tangle, right the way to Don Quixote’s heralded exit at the end, carrying his preposterously long lance, we are in the Cervantian world of satire and romance, tongue-in-cheek but also strangely heart-warming.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
What do we all require from ALICE? A plunge downward and upward, a play of size and proportion, of sense and nonsense. In short, a full dose of orderly mayhem and chaotic order, the core principles of Wonderland. Septime Webre’s vivacious production, aided by the gorgeous stage designs of James Kronzer and Jeremy W. Foil, and delicious costumes from Liz Vandal, does just that.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
What do we all require from ALICE? A plunge downward and upward, a play of size and proportion, of sense and nonsense. In short, a full dose of orderly mayhem and chaotic order, the core principles of Wonderland. Septime Webre’s vivacious production, aided by the gorgeous stage designs of James Kronzer and Jeremy W. Foil, and delicious costumes from Liz Vandal, does just that.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
It’s interesting to reflect, at times, on what creative types of the future will do with the super-abundance of email correspondence, but if email represent anything like the treasure trove that handwritten letters have always been for those digging into the past, then we should not worry. Opening the Lyric Opera of Kansas City’s season was an epistolary opera of a kind.
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May 10, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
I’ve been lecturing on aestheticism recently and toying with ideas about art for art’s sake, which had its moment in the heady fin de siècle years in England with Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and that set boldly and brilliantly pushing art away from the moralism of Victorian narratives. Tonight, as I watched Kansas City Ballet’s interpretation of Balanchine’s Jewels, the connection suddenly came to me.
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Mar 22, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
It’s always interesting to have a line-up of seven never-before-seen works on the program, as we did last night at Kansas City Ballet’s annual showcase of contemporary ballet, New Moves. How do we prepare ourselves for the unfamiliar? I remember reading a line from a well-known interior designer to the effect that one should always include at least one antique in a space because it grounds everything else. I feel much the same way when watching contemporary ballet.
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Mar 9, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
It can be hard to tell a story everyone knows well, and tell it in a way that feels fresh as well as familiar. Yet Doug Scholz-Carlson’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette pulls this off very nicely at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Combining traditional Renaissance trappings with a definite contemporary edge, the production, with sets by William Boles, privileges drawing out the opera’s symbolism, grounding the busy plot in the essentials which transcend time and space.
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Feb 16, 2024 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
This is a boy ballet. I mean, a ballet about a boy. That’s a fairly uncommon experience, as ballets go. I’m racking my brains. Yes, there’s often an amusing sidekick to a prince or a hero, ‘the funny one’, the secondary part. But Peter Pan is unquestionably about a boy, a boy who will never be anything other than a boy, and the casting of said boy has to be just right for it all to hold together.
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Dec 1, 2023 | 
bachtrack.com | Hilary Stroh
It’s not hard to imagine that there must be company dancers who secretly (or not so secretly) dread the annual return of the industrial run that is The Nutcracker, who know every moment of it by heart, who’ve progressed upwards through the roles over the course of a ballet career, from a cute baby mouse to a Flower or a Snowflake, or even the dizzying glitter of Sugar Plum herself.
