(HOLLYWOOD PRESS CORPS) — The New York City Ballet Carnival of Animals was created in 2003 by Christopher Wheeldon’s with the collaboration of John Lithgow, it is part of the New York City Ballet’s Winter 2025 Season.
Carnival of Animals is a humorous musical suite of 14 movements composed by Camille Saint-Saens, for a private performance in 1886.
A live orchestra mimics the sounds and the animal’s personalities.
The Royal March of the Lion is the first movement of the piece. It follows movements of hens and roosters, donkeys, swift animals, tortoises, an elephant, kangoroos, fish, cuckoo, birds and a swan. One particular movement pays homage to fossilized animals.
Lithgow, author of children’s books, was approached by Wheeldon to write a story based on the musical suite.
Lithgow imagined a story of a young boy, Oliver Pendleton Percy the Third, who falls asleep in New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and dreams that everyone in his life (family, friends and teachers) take forms of different fantastic animals.
Oliver’s great aunt, who is also a former ballerina, is transformed in the swan, the librarian as a kangaroo, who dreams of being a mermaid, his teacher as the lion, and his worried parents, as cuckoos.
Lithgow, starts as a narrator and transforms in to a school nurse and later on, waltz in to a magestic and flirtatious elephant, that steals the show.
The New York City Ballet continues through February 27 at the David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center.
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