The Mariinsky Ballet returned to the Kennedy Center Opera House on Tuesday night for a run of performances of its classic production of The Sleeping Beauty. Classic can also be a nice way of saying tired, and this choreography by Marius Petipa, updated by Konstantine Sergeyev and Fedor Lopukhov, has the advantage of being a fairy-tale, wedding-cake piece of fluff and the disadvantage of the same. The company from St. Petersburg, which has apparently taken the final step toward shedding its Soviet past by dropping its former name of Kirov Ballet, is not willing quite yet to break with its past when its comes to the sacred cows (the premiere of Tchaikovsky's music and Petipa's choreography were given by the Mariinsky Theater in 1890). Whether you think that is good or bad depends on your tastes. more ›

The Mariinsky Ballet, the St. Petersburg company formerly known as the Kirov Ballet, brought its charming, old production of Don Quixote to Washington this week. Alexander Gorsky's adaptation of the classic 1869 choreography by Marius Petipa dates back to the first decade of the 20th century, and not much about it has changed since then. Anyone interested in the cutting edge of ballet is unlikely to be much taken with this bit of history, but for the ballet neophyte it would be a grand, agreeable introduction - a light-hearted, at times slapstick ballet in which the only suicide turns out to be fake. more ›