(Gia Kourlas’s article appeared in The New York Times, 7/29; via Pam Green.)
With dogged perseverance, Christopher Wheeldon has turned himself into a storyteller. For a choreographer who made his mark with nonnarrative ballets, like “Polyphonia,” that embraced form with a quietly effortless and eerie power, his current crop of narrative dances plants him firmly on the side of tradition. Yes, he won a Tony Award for “An American in Paris,” but over the past few years, I’ve found myself missing the Mr. Wheeldon whose imagination wasn’t bound by plot.
This season the Lincoln Center Festival is presenting “The Winter’s Tale,” his 2014 adaptation of that late Shakespearean romance, created jointly for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada. Performed by the Canadian company, it opened on Thursday at the David H. Koch Theater. Unfolding in three acts, the ballet — a tale of jealousy, death, abandonment, love and, finally, redemption — shows Mr. Wheeldon interpretingShakespeare’s complicated story with ease.