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The Arts Intel Report

The Dream

May 9–12, 2024
240 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

The comeback of the story ballet has grown stronger in the 2020s, with new evening-length works from Christopher Wheeldon (Like Water for Chocolate) and Cathy Marston (Atonement). But story ballets don’t have to run a whole evening. In the 20th century, narrative ballets of one act were the norm and many were masterpieces that used classical technique in astonishing ways. One need only look at the arabesques in Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire (1942), Apollonian arrows set psychologically ablaze, to know what this means. This May, the Philadelphia Ballet offers a program of two great story ballets: Frederick Ashton’s The Dream (1964), a charming version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and George Balanchine’s Prodigal Son (1929), the biblical story told with thrilling invention. —Laura Jacobs