This double bill takes its name from the jewel that the British choreographer Frederick Ashton made from Shakespeare’s summery comedy of errors, to music by Mendelssohn as vivid as a Tchaikovsky ballet though less turbulent, more purely enchanted. In the Ashton, unlike in the earlier Midsummer Night’s Dream by Balanchine, love does triumph in the fairy realm—or submits, anyway, in a soft pliancy between fairy king and queen. All the bone gets knocked out of them by their reawakened pleasure and desire. Ashton’s 1964 one-act pagan-pastoral tells the story with leisurely economy, taking its time yet never wasting a step. In its Boston—and Boston Ballet—debut, The Dream joins a premiere by the talented Forsythian My’Kale Stromile, a former Boston Ballet dancer as close to the start of his choreographic career as Ashton, in 1964, was to the end. —Apollinaire Scherr
Arts Intel Report
Boston Ballet: The Dream
The fairies Oberon and Titania in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream.
When
Mar 19–29, 2026
Where
Etc
Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.