Wilde Times: Patricia Wilde, George Balanchine, and the Rise of New York City Ballet

Lobenthal, Joel

ISBN 10: 1611688035 / ISBN 13: 9781611688030

Published by ForeEdge, Lebanon, NH, 2016

About this Item

8vo, 312 pp.

Seller Inventory # 107011

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Wilde Times: Patricia Wilde, George Balanchine, and the Rise of New York City Ballet
• Publisher: ForeEdge, Lebanon, NH
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1611688035
• ISBN 13: 9781611688030
• Binding: hardcover
• Illustrator: Illus. with photos
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy in fine dust jacket
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Performing Arts

About this title

Synopsis

At eighty-seven, Patricia Wilde remains a grande dame of the ballet world. As a young star she toured America in the company of the Ballet Russe. In her heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, she was a first-generation member and principal dancer of New York City Ballet during the uniquely dramatic Balanchine era―the golden age of the company and its hugely gifted, influential, exploitative, and dictatorial director. In Wilde Times, Joel Lobenthal brings the world of Wilde and Balanchine, of Tanaquil Le Clercq, Diana Adams, Suzanne Farrell, Maria Tallchief, and many others thrillingly to life. With unfettered access to Wilde and her family, friends, and colleagues, Lobenthal takes the reader backstage to some of the greatest ballet triumphs of the modern era―and some of the greatest tragedies. Through it all Patricia Wilde emerges as a figure of towering strength, grace, and grit. Wilde Times is the first biography of this seminal figure in American dance, written with the cooperation of the star, but wide-ranging in its use of sources to tell the full and intertwining stories of the development of Wilde, of Balanchine, and of American national ballet at its peak in the twentieth century.

About the Author

JOEL LOBENTHAL is associate editor of the quarterly Ballet Review. He was chief dance critic for the New York Sun from 2005 until the paper closed in 2008. He has also written about dance, opera, theater, film, and books for Capital New York, City Arts, Playbill, Dance Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and the New York Post. He is the author of Tallulah! and coauthor of Dancing on Water with Elena Tchernichova. He lives in Manhattan.