I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I last saw a David Parsons program or what I saw whenever it was, but that isn’t surprising, since I can’t really remember the first half of a David Parsons program while I’m watching the second half. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, ‘The Tempest’ loses much of its resonance. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
The first movement ballerina should be a paradigm of strength and authority. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
Schumann’s ‘Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings’ is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, ‘Bleak House’ is, for many readers, Dickens’s greatest novel. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues – probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life – even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
Paris, as always, is swarming with Americans, and these days, it’s also swarming with hamburgers. Oddly, though, it’s not typically the Americans who are pursuing the perfect burger on the perfect bun with the obligatory side of perfect coleslaw; the Americans are pursuing the perfect blanquette de veau. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
The early giants of modern dance – Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis – barely left traces of their art. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
Black Swan’ does what Hollywood movies have always done – it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with ‘The Wrestler,’ only with a prettier protagonist. Robert Gottlieb Read Quote
