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Arts Intel Report

Boston Ballet: The Dream

The fairies Oberon and Titania in Frederick Ashton’s The Dream.

Mar 19–29, 2026
539 Washington Street Boston, MA 02111, United States

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

Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.