Atlanta Ballet announces 2013-14 season

Play on, Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare!

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  • Charlie McCullers/Atlanta Ballet
  • THE PLAY’S THE THING: The Atlanta Ballet’s 2013-14 season includes a production of “Hamlet.” It’s one show in a season that’s likewise full of story ballets based on theatrical works.

“The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” Hamlet famously says. For the Atlanta Ballet, the play is certainly the thing for its 2013-14 season. The recently announced lineup is full of works, old and new, based on classic plays.

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Perhaps most intriguing of all is the work that will end the season, a world premiere choreographed by the Atlanta Ballet’s newest choreographer in residence, Helen Pickett. Pickett has chosen to create a dance version of Tennessee Williams’ “Camino Real.”

“Camino Real” was an unusual play for Williams, a work of magic realism in which iconic characters including Kilroy, Don Quixote, Casanova, Lord Byron, and Violetta from “La Traviata” wander through a surreal dead-end town somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. The poetic work, which was written in 1953 just after the huge hit “A Streetcar Named Desire,” was a commercial and critical failure at the time of its premiere. However, theaters have picked it up again from time to time, and it has more than its share of proponents, including this critic, who feel that it’s actually one of Williams’ best works, certainly among his most intriguing and inventive. Theatrical versions have been notoriously difficult to produce successfully, so we’re already curious to see how it will fare as a dance work in May of 2014. The fact that it will be paired on a program with a world premiere by company dancer and choreographer Tara Lee makes it even better.