Robert Gottlieb Time Quotations

The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was 'Swan Lake.' The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning.

What makes a publishing house great? The easy answer is the consistency with which it produces books of value over a lengthy period of time.

It was a basic story -- three or four or five girls start off together, one finds love, one goes crazy and/or dies, and one of them becomes a huge success -- but Rona's take was very up-to-date. What made it work for the time was that it had a fresh young-career-women-in-New York quality with a fillip of shock.

Melissa Barak, an ex-City Ballet dancer and sometime choreographer, has put together an unspeakably dopey and incompetent mess called 'Call Me Ben,' combining ultra-generic dance, terrible dialogue and disastrous storytelling, about the founding of Las Vegas by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who insists, violently, on being addressed as 'Ben.'

How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.