Bob Crowley

Designer Bob Crowley was born in the Irish city of Cork. After studying fine art at the Crawford Art School, he moved to England to train in theatre design at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Crowley’s breakthrough production was The Duchess of Malfi at the Royal Exchange, a huge critical success that resulted in Crowley being invited to work for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. He later made his Royal Opera debut in 1987 creating designs for The King Goes Forth to France, directed by Nicholas Hytner, and has since created designs for La Traviata, directed by Richard Eyre, and The Knot Garden and Don Carlo, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Crowley has additionally created designs for The Royal Ballet, including the 1996 revival of Kenneth MacMillan’s Anastasia and Christopher Wheeldon’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Winter’s Tale, and Strapless. 

Over the years, Crowley has designed more than twenty productions for the National Theatre, including Pinocchio, The Hard Problem, Travelling Light, The Habit of Art, Phèdre, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Collaborators, Fram - which he also co-directed - His Girl Friday, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The History Boys. He’s also designed numerous productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including The Plantagenets for which he won an Olivier Award, along with Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Crowley has designed extensively for Broadway and the West End, including in 2018 for My Name is Lucy Barton and Alys Always at the Bridge Theatre, as well as in 2019 for Inheritance, which was transferred from the Young Vic. His designs have been featured in movies and television films, including Othello, Tales from Hollywood, Suddenly Last Summer, and The Crucible. Other opera designs include Great Scott at the Dallas Opera, The Magic Flute at the English National Opera, and The Cunning Little Vixen at Théâtre du Châtelet. Additional designs were made for The Glass Menagerie, Carousel, The Capeman, Disney’s Aladdin, Aida, and Mary Poppins, The Year of Magical Thinking, Coast of Utopia, Once, The Audience, Skylight, Don Carlo, La Traviata, An American in Paris, and Tarzan, which he also directed.

Crowley’s many accolades include The RDI Award, seven Tony Awards, three Olivier Awards, The Royal Designer for Industry Award, and the Robert L.B. Tobin Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theatrical Design. 

Kevin McKenzie

Kevin McKenzie was a leading dancer with both The Joffrey Ballet and the National Ballet of Washington before joining American Ballet Theatre as a Soloist in March 1979.  He was appointed a Principal Dancer the following December and danced with the company until 1991.  A native of Vermont, McKenzie received his ballet training at the Washington School of Ballet. In 1972, McKenzie was awarded a silver medal at the Sixth International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria.

As a Principal Dancer with ABT, McKenzie danced leading roles in all of the major full-length classics including Solor in Natalia Makarova’s full‑length production of La Bayadère, Don Jose in Roland Petit’s Carmen, the Prince in Mikhail Baryshnikov’s production of the full‑length Cinderella, Franz in Coppélia, the Gentleman With Her in Dim Lustre, Basil and Espada in Baryshnikov’s Don Quixote (Kitri’s Wedding), Albrecht in Giselle, a leading role in The Garden of Villandry, Her Lover in Jardin aux Lilas, the male lead in The Leaves Are Fading, the Friend in Pillar of Fire, the leading role in Raymonda (Grand Pas Hongrois), a featured role in Requiem, the Champion Roper in Rodeo, Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Prince Desire in The Sleeping Beauty, Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, James in La Sylphide, and leading roles in Other Dances, Paquita, Les Sylphides, Sylvia Pas de Deux, and Theme and Variations. He created Amnon in Martine van Hamel’s Amnon V’Tamar and a leading role in Clark Tippet’s S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A.

During his performing career, McKenzie appeared as a Guest Artist throughout the world, including in Spoleto, Italy; Paris, London, Tokyo, Havana, Moscow, Vienna, and Korea, dancing with, among others, the London Festival Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, the National Ballet of Cuba, and the Universal Ballet in Seoul.  In September 1989, McKenzie was appointed a permanent guest artist with The Washington Ballet and, in 1991, assumed the position of Artistic Associate.  He has also acted as Associate Artistic Director and choreographer with Martine van Hamel’s New Amsterdam Ballet.

McKenzie was appointed Artistic Director of American Ballet Theatre in October 1992.  His previous choreographic credits include Groupo Zambaria (1984) and Liszt Études (l991) both for Martine van Hamel’s New Amsterdam Ballet, Lucy and the Count (1992) for The Washington Ballet and, for American Ballet Theatre, The Nutcracker (1993), Don Quixote (1995, in collaboration with Susan Jones) a new production of Swan Lake (2000), the conception and direction of a new production of Raymonda (2004, with choreography by Anna-Marie Holmes), and a new production of The Sleeping Beauty with Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov.  In 2014, McKenzie, with ABT Principal Répétiteur Irina Kolpakova, staged a new production of Raymonda Divertissements.

McKenzie has received numerous awards including honorary degrees from Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont (1993) and Adelphi University in Garden City, New York (2019), the Dance Magazine Award (1999), and the Medal of Honor for Achievement in Dance from the National Arts Club (2019).  In addition, he appeared in two Emmy Award winning broadcasts, The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore (1970) and American Ballet Theatre in Le Corsaire (1998) both for PBS’s Dance in America series.  McKenzie is a founding board member of Kaatsbaan International Dance Center in Tivoli, New York.

In December 2022, McKenzie retired as American Ballet Theatre Artistic Director, after three decades of leadership.

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky, born in Kamsko‑Votnsk in the district of Viatka on May 7, 1840, was the son of a mining engineer. Although he began piano instruction at the age of five and showed signs of musical precociousness, a musical career was not anticipated at that time. In 1850, he was enrolled in the preparatory class of the School of Jurisprudence when his family moved to St. Petersburg. He was admitted to the School of Jurisprudence in 1852, and while he was still a student there, he composed a canzonetta that became his first published work.

In 1859, he completed his course of study and took a post as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice, but he continued to pursue musical studies, including voice, thoroughbass and composition. He resigned from his post in l863 and became a full-time student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, directed by Anton Rubinstein. It was during this period that he made his debut as a conductor and composed The Storm, his only student composition to be heard with any frequency today. In it, he already exhibited stylistic elements prominent in his later works, including the influence of Russian folk-melody, a command of Western compositional techniques and a flair for brilliant orchestration. Even before his graduation in 1865, he was offered a position as teacher of harmony at what was to become the Moscow Conservatory. In 1866, he moved to Moscow. There he came under the influence of Anton’s brother Nikolai Rubinstein and met Peter Jurgenson, who would eventually become his publisher.

His First Symphony, begun in 1866, proved to be a difficult and laborious exercise for Tchaikovsky, who found the structural demands of the symphonic sonata form incompatible with his own style. It was not performed until 1869, but it was well received. His began first opera, Voyevoda, in 1867, the year in which he met Berlioz and Balakirev, leader of the nationalistic movement in Russian music. Balakirev conducted the first St. Petersburg performance of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic fantasia Fatum, composed in 1868. Tchaikovsky later destroyed the work, as he would several others, but it was eventually reconstructed. Balakirev’s influence was also felt in Tchaikovsky’s first masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet, which he rewrote several times at Balakirev’s suggestion.

From 1870 to 1874, Tchaikovsky became increasingly interested in nationalistic music, although his conservatory training and familiarity with Western techniques kept him outside the circle of “The Mighty Five” (Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov). His nationalistic tendencies came to a peak with the opera Vakula the Smith, first staged in 1876, by which time his infatuation with nationalism in music had declined.

He wrote his first music for solo instrument and orchestra from 1874 to 1877, including his celebrated First Piano Concerto (1875), and in 1875–76 composed his first ballet, Swan Lake.  The first performance in 1877 was considered a failure, based less upon Tchaikovsky’s score (which was severely cut and further compromised with interpolations by other composers) than by a poor performance and mediocre physical production. Swan Lake was later revived with new choreography by Petipa and Ivanov in 1895, at which time it was recognized as a masterpiece of the ballet repertoire.

Around the end of 1876, Tchaikovsky began to receive financial support from a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, who was to remain his devoted patroness for the next 14 years. With a new found financial security, Tchaikovsky embarked upon a period of incredible musical fecundity, producing such cornerstones of the international repertoire as his Fourth Symphony, the violin concerto and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Most of his compositions from the years 1878–84 have not proved as enduring, although his stature in Russia continued to grow, as exemplified by two events in 1884: his opera Mazeppa was given concurrent productions in St. Petersburg and Mosocw and he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir by the Tsar.

In 1887, Tchaikovsky undertook his first foreign tour as a conductor, during which he met such notables as Brahms and Grieg. It was almost immediately after composing his Fifth Symphony in 1888 that he began work on his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. The work was given an elaborate premiere and was well received, but the public reaction did not meet the expectations of the composer, choreographer (Petipa) and designer-impresario (Vsevolozhsky), and it was to be some years before the work was recognized as one of the pinnacles of classical ballet.

Tchaikovsky went on without pause to compose the opera The Queen of Spades, which received a successful premiere in 1890 and, along with Eugene Onegin, became an international repertory item. Its success brought about a commission from the Imperial Theatre for two one-act works, the opera Iolanta and the ballet The Nutcracker, one of his most enduringly popular works despite its disappointing reception at its 1892 premiere.

Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, his most profoundly pessimistic work, was first performed October 28, 1893.  Nine days later, he died. His death is universally considered to have been a suicide, but the circumstances leading to it have become a musicological controversy that is yet to be resolved.

Once considered by his contemporaries to be too Western in his style, Tchaikovsky was later lionized by Igor Stravinsky as the most Russian of Russian composers. His greatest strength, his incomparable gift for melody, was also responsible for his difficulty in composing within the structures of the German school of composition, and his blatant emotionalism has alienated some commentators. Nonetheless, he is today one of the most popular of all composers, and he created masterpieces in every genre. His music seems uniquely suited to ballet, with its inexhaustible stream of melody, an instinctive sense of movement considered ideal for the human body, and an irresistible rhythmic pulse and brilliant orchestration. It is no coincidence that all three of his ballets are firmly entrenched in the international repertoire.

Thomas R. Skelton

Thomas R. Skelton, one of the most distinguished lighting designers in America, designed the lighting for many Broadway productions, including The King and I, Guys and Dolls, Coco, Gigi, Purlie, A Matter of Gravity, Death of a Salesman (both the Dustin Hoffman and George C. Scott revivals), Absurd Person Singular, Jimmy Shine, Caesar and Cleopatra, Mike Downstairs, Your Own Thing, Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, Shenandoah, Lena Horne, the Lady and Her Music, The Kingfisher, Westside Waltz and revivals of Oklahoma!, Peter Pan, Brigadoon and The King and I.  He also designed lighting for numerous productions at the Circle in the Square, Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Shakespeare Festival.  Skelton received Tony nominations for Indians and All God’s Chillun Got Wings.

For the ballet stage, he illuminated Jerome Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering, Robert Joffrey’s Astarte, Heinz Poll’s Scenes From Childhood, Jose Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane, Paul Taylor’s Aureole, Martha Graham’s Rite of Spring, Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, Gerald Arpino’s Kettantanz, Leonide Massine’s Parade and numerous other ballets for The Joffrey Ballet, Boston Ballet, The Feld Ballet, New York City Ballet, The Paul Taylor Dance Company, Nureyev and Friends, and the Ohio Ballet.

He designed the lighting for American Ballet Theatre’s productions of John Neumeier’s Hamlet Connotations (1976), Antony Tudor’s The Tiller in the Fields (1978), Eliot Feld’s Variations on ‘America’ (1981), Peter Anastos’s Clair de lune (1982), Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet (1965) and The Sleeping Beauty (1987), Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend (1989 revival), Coppélia (1991 revival, with original staging by Arthur Saint-Leon and choreography by Enrique Martinez), Nicholas Beriosoff’s staging of The Firebird (1992), Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon (1993), the revival of David Blair’s staging of Swan Lake (1993) and Kevin McKenzie’s production of The Nutcracker (1993).

Skelton taught at the New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design and at Yale University.  He served on the Board of DANCE/USA and was the Associate Director for the Ohio Ballet, which ran in Akron, Ohio until 2006.  Skelton died in August 1994, aged 66.