With ‘Étoile,’ Amy Sherman-Palladino Gives Ballet Another Whirl

With ‘Étoile,’ Amy Sherman-Palladino Gives Ballet Another Whirl

The dancers streamed across the stage of a historic Paris theater, leaping and turning, the women lifted high into the air and whirled aloft, before aligning to bow on the final chords of the music. “Bravo! Bravo!” cried the enthusiastically applauding audience. Then Amy Sherman-Palladino, sporting a white baseball cap, …

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‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

Instead of finishing his masterpiece “Khovanshchina,” Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk. That’s fiction: a scene from “Moscow-Petushki,” a 1969 satire by the Soviet …

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