Philadelphia Ballet Stars and Stripes Forever Review
October 8, 2026 | Academy of Music – Philadelphia, PA, USA
American ballet has always had an appetite for spectacle. If there is one thing it does well, it is to go big.
In Philadelphia Ballet’s Stars and Stripes Forever!, that revelry takes several forms: the streetwise charisma of Jerome Robbins, the urban sophistication of Gershwin’s Manhattan, and the grand, unabashedly patriotic exuberance of Balanchine.
It’s opening night. I brought out my star-spangled cowboy boots for the occasion, a pair I rarely wear because they are loud and ostentatious, and not subtle. But then again, subtlety has never been the point of Stars and Stripes Forever!
The live orchestra sets the tone from the first downbeat, filling the Academy of Music with brass, strings, and the kind of sound that makes you sit up a little straighter. Under Artistic Director Angel Corella, Philadelphia Ballet takes on Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, Eliot Feld’s Variations on “America,” and two works by George Balanchine, Who Cares? and Stars and Stripes.
It is an ambitious program, and the dancers meet it with an infectious sense of purpose.
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Philadelphia Ballet Stars and Stripes Forever Review
Robbins’s Fancy Free follows three sailors on shore leave in wartime New York City looking for a good time and, naturally, romantic competition. The ballet has an almost cartoonish allure. Even drinking a pint of beer becomes choreography; the barre, in this case, is a bar. With its Broadway sensibility and flirtatious partnering, the work turns a night out into a contest for attention.
Nicholas Patterson is a firecracker, bringing pistol-like precision to the choreography. His movements snap into place, each accent crisp and explosive.
Jack Thomas has an all-American versatility, moving easily between athleticism, comic timing, and theatrical amusement.
And Arian Molina Soca? He is having a ball. He knows when to turn up the charm, when to milk a moment, and when to let the audience in on the joke. Facing upstage, he gives his hips a deliberate side-to-side shimmy, showing off his assets with the confidence of a man who knows perfectly well that he is being watched. The theater erupts. He is not simply dancing the steps; he is hamming it up, and the audience is happy to play along.
The three seem made for these roles.
But Fancy Free requires more than charismatic dancers sharing a stage. Its comedy depends on camaraderie: the easy banter, the competitive posturing, the sense that these men have been friends long enough to know exactly how to get under one another’s skin. That chemistry gives the flirtation its spark.
Credit Corella for bringing it out. The sailors do not feel like individual performances stitched together; they feel like a trio of friends out on the town, each determined to have the better night.
Oksana Maslova, who seems to me almost technically flawless, brings an artistry to her character that makes every movement feel considered. Having seen her as Juliet last season, I was struck again by her ability to convey personality through the smallest details. She is catlike in her transitions, moving with a fluidity that makes even the most carefully controlled steps look instinctive.
Nayara Lopes is equally at home in her role, bringing sinuous and elongated poise. Together, this pair brings technical cohesion and enchanting characterization to the work. Their chemistry gives the women’s side of the story its own life, and the casting feels every bit as right as that of the sailors. While the men compete for their attention, Maslova and Lopes seem perfectly capable of enjoying the spectacle on their own terms.
Feld’s Variations on “America,” set to Leonard Bernstein’s music, shifts from Robbins’s theatrical storytelling to a more abstract interplay between classical technique and grounded, modern movement.
Willa Kim, the Tony Award-winning costume designer inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2007, gives this 1977 ballet its unmistakable late-’70s athletic flair. Roxander looks straight out of The Karate Kid while Iseda wears the cutest tutu I’ve ever seen. Her torso swings side to side like the Liberty Bell itself, each tilt crisp and deliberate. The audience laughs; we know the Liberty Bell when we see it. In this playful, athletic pas de deux, American symbols become movement, punctuated by march-like rhythms.
Feld clearly loved pointe work, judging by the relentless marches en pointe, as if even a military procession were an excuse to get on the tips of one’s toes. Roxander and Iseda can do it all: soaring lifts, shoulder sits, and intricate partnering that demands both athletic power and split-second precision.
In Who Cares?, Balanchine turns George Gershwin’s music into a love letter to New York. The choreography is bright, leggy, and relentlessly musical, with dancers darting through syncopations and intricate footwork as though the city itself has set the tempo. Gershwin’s genre bending composition showcases the full range of a dancer’s technical prowess.
This is peak, peak, peak ballet. Brisé volé comes fast and furious, leaving little time to recover before the next musical turn.
Sterling Baca moves among Thays Golz, Dayesi Torriente, and Sydney Dolan with the confidence and adaptability the work requires, but the three women are every bit his match. Their turns are tight, their lines gorgeous, their arabesques seemingly endless. The petite allegro arrives in a flurry of quick footwork, and they manage it without sacrificing the elegance that makes Balanchine so difficult to dance well.
Together, they are stunning: four distinct dancers with a shared instinct for musicality, clarity, and style.
There is something moving about seeing these women command the stage, knowing what some of them have navigated away from it. One has returned after having a baby; another after a serious injury. Neither circumstance defines her dancing, nor should it. But watching them execute Balanchine with such speed, assurance, and musicality makes the achievement all the more striking. They are not simply keeping up with the choreography. They are making it sing.
Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes closes the program with the force of a fireworks show. Sousa’s marches propel the dancers through explosive jumps, rapid-fire canons, and formations that expand and contract across the stage. One moment, the stage seems almost too small to contain the grandeur; the next, the dancers snap into military precision, each body finding its exact place in the larger design.
Military precision makes the grandeur possible; the grandeur makes that precision thrilling to behold.
Balanchine gives us spectacle, then order, then spectacle again. The effect is exhilarating.
I can’t help but love Balanchine’s geometric mind. He knows how to make a stage feel enormous without losing sight of the smallest detail. Lines stretch across the space, formations divide and recombine, and dancers move in coordinated patterns that are as thrilling to watch collectively as they are demanding individually.
The eye takes in the grand picture, but the pleasure is in the particulars: the timing of a cannon, the precision of a jump, the way one group arrives just as another clears the stage.
Nothing feels accidental. The architecture is rigorous, but the result never feels stiff.
That is the delicious contradiction at the heart of Stars and Stripes. Ballet technique, with all its discipline and refinement, meets the unabashed grandeur of American patriotic spectacle. Their jumps are expansive, their footwork crisp, their formations exact.
Balanchine asks them to be individual virtuosos and parts of a larger machine, and the magic lies in watching those demands coexist.
The men. Oh, the men. It is rare to see an entire corps of men onstage, a veritable gaggle of them, and they are here to show off.
Tours, double tours, canons into multiple pirouettes, jumps, soaring grand jetés, and batterie that snaps through the air. My jaw is on the floor. Too often, male dancers are cast as the sturdy frame for a ballerina’s prettiness, there to lift, support, and make her look weightless. Here, the men get their own moment in the spotlight, unleashing their technical bravado with unapologetic force. They don’t just support the spectacle. They are the spectacle.
Across the stage, the corps becomes a living geometry, but the dancers never disappear entirely into the design. Their personalities come through, as does the pleasure they take in the sheer audacity of what they have been asked to do.
By the finale, the spectacle has reached glorious proportions. Balanchine pushes the theatricality to its limit without allowing the choreography to lose its shape. It is a fireworks display engineered by a mathematician, every burst extravagant, every trajectory calculated.
The result is technically exacting, visually ingenious, and gloriously, unapologetically American.
There is a lot riding on a company’s decision to perform works that have become part of ballet’s canon. Respecting the choreography is a given; making it feel alive onstage is the harder part.
Philadelphia Ballet meets that challenge. The dancers bring personality, energy, and conviction to the repertory that can easily feel overly familiar in less capable hands. These ballets are not treated as museum pieces or dutiful exercises in preservation. They feel alive, performed with a sense of discovery.
The program also raises a question about the American ballet canon itself. All four works are by men, and Balanchine appears twice. These choreographers helped shape the repertory, but they are hardly the only artists who have shaped American dance.
Who gets the opportunity to create the next generation of classics, and whose work receives the institutional support to endure?
Alas, for Philadelphia Ballet, the evening was a major win. The company honors the past while giving audiences plenty of reasons to stay invested in what comes next.
Featured Photo of Philadelphia Ballet’s Yuka Iseda and Ashton Roxander in Eliot Feld’s Variations on “America”. Photo by Alexander Iziliaev.
