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" Nothing is harder to create than brilliant comic ballets, except maybe brilliant full-evening comic ballets. "

Robert Gottlieb

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" The mysteries and scandals of the Kremlin are nothing compared to the mysteries and scandals of the Bolshoi. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'Empty Moves' is elegantly and coolly inventive. Two pairs of dancers shadow each other in slow, deliberate rearrangements and manipulations of legs and torsos, only occasionally switching partners or breaking free of the formal patterning. "

Robert Gottlieb

" The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa 'Sleeping Beauty,' and no ballet is harder to get right. "

Robert Gottlieb

" When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices. "

Robert Gottlieb

" You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. "

Robert Gottlieb

" A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival. "

Robert Gottlieb

" The best thing you can say about Hubbard Street is that if you were a dancer, this is a company you'd fight to get into. "

Robert Gottlieb

" There is no consolation for anyone in the Scott Peterson story, and no final illumination. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Ballet companies have their ups and downs, just like the rest of us. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Wayne McGregor's 'Dyad 1929' is a good example of this capable British choreographer's work. "

Robert Gottlieb

" One of the eternal mysteries of ballet is how untalented choreographers find backers for their work, and then find good dancers to perform in it. Is it irresistible charm? Chutzpah? Pure determination? Blackmail? Or are so many supposedly knowledgeable people just plain blind? "

Robert Gottlieb

" The finest chroniclers of the great and the near-great have often been courtiers - the Duc de Saint-Simon, for instance, or Lady Murasaki. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Most famous stage actors tactfully fade away. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" Blood is the leitmotif of 'Black Swan.' "

Robert Gottlieb

" We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don't bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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.' "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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

" 'The Leaves Are Fading' had something of a vogue when Antony Tudor made it in 1975, largely because of Gelsey Kirkland's ravishing performance. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Audiences love Paul Taylor, and so do I. Not everything, and not always, but year in, year out, he gives me more concentrated pleasure than I get from any other dance company. "

Robert Gottlieb

" When December comes, can 'The Nutcracker' be far behind? No, it can't - not in America, anyway. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Ballet in September used to be dead as a dodo. Now, with City Ballet's ingenious decision to give us four weeks of repertory in the early fall, having cut down on the relentlessly long spring season when dancers, critics and audiences droop on the vine, we wake up after the dog days of August with something to look at. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1870, having produced fifteen novels, many of which can confidently be called great, as well as having accomplished outstanding work in activities into which his insatiable need to expend his vast energies - to achieve, to prevail - carried him: journalism, editing, acting, social reform. "

Robert Gottlieb

" Once, Pina Bausch was about something, however disagreeable. "

Robert Gottlieb

" '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

" In traditional 'Swan Lakes,' it's Prince Siegfried's 21st-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 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. "

Robert Gottlieb

" 'River of Light,' to a dense but powerful score commissioned from Charles Wuorinen and with ravishing lighting by Mark Stanley, has depth and resonance. "

Robert Gottlieb