Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which in Manhattan society means the costume season begins on Thursday and the costumes cost considerably more than usual. American Ballet Theatre has taken the hint. Its 2026 Fall Gala, on Oct. 29 at the David H. Koch Theater, is titled “Angels and Demons,” and it will honor Cynthia Erivo, the British actress and singer who has spent the last few years becoming the most in-demand witch on either side of the Atlantic.
The program was announced earlier this month by Artistic Director Susan Jaffe and reported by BroadwayWorld’s A.A. Cristi, who describes an evening conceived as “a spirited nod to the Halloween season” that will turn the Koch into “a theatrical celebration of the light and dark, the ethereal and mischievous.” Those are the company’s words, as BroadwayWorld relays them, and for once a press release undersells the program.
The menu of angels
Jaffe, who curated the evening, has built it the way the best gala programs are built: as a tasting menu that lets every principal dancer have a moment and lets the donors leave by 9. According to BroadwayWorld, the night features three works by Frederick Ashton, including the company premiere of Dance of the Blessed Spirits, danced by Daniel Camargo, along with pas de deux from The Dream, with Catherine Hurlin and Isaac Hernández, and Sylvia, with Christine Shevchenko and Calvin Royal III.
Then come the demons, or at least the mischief. There are excerpts from Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream, the confectionery fever dream in which a sugar-sick boy hallucinates his way through a pastry shop; from La Sylphide, staged after Bournonville, with Hee Seo and Joo Won Ahn; and from Enrique Martinez’s Coppélia, with Skylar Brandt and Roman Zhurbin. The program closes, BroadwayWorld reports, with Herman Cornejo and Léa Fleytoux in Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose; Agnes de Mille’s comic Three Virgins and a Devil, with Jake Roxander, Devon Teuscher, SunMi Park, Sierra Armstrong and Tyler Maloney; and, inevitably, the Act III pas de deux from Swan Lake, danced by Chloe Misseldine and Aran Bell. Black Swan, the original demon in a tutu, gets the last word.
Principal dancers Thomas Forster and James Whiteside will host. Whiteside, a dancer who moonlights as a drag performer and pop musician, is about as natural a master of ceremonies for a Halloween-themed ballet gala as the company could possibly have found.
Why Erivo
ABT has not, as of this writing, published a lengthy citation for its honoree, and The City Politic will not invent one. But the case makes itself. Erivo won a Tony for her Broadway turn in The Color Purple, and she has since become a film star with her performance as Elphaba in the Wicked films, a role that has made her, in the public imagination, the defining green-skinned misfit of the decade. A gala built around angels and demons honoring the woman who made the Wicked Witch of the West sympathetic is either a coincidence or a very elegant piece of programming. We suspect the latter.
There is also something apt about a ballet company honoring a singer. Ballet galas frequently reserve their laurels for donors and dance-world luminaries. Choosing a performer from the musical theater world signals that ABT is thinking about its audience the way Broadway does: as people who will buy a ticket for a star. It is not a bad approach, so long as the stars are this good.
ABT, for its part, has the institutional standing to carry it off. The company, founded in 1940, was designated America’s National Ballet Company by an act of Congress in 2006, a fact its boilerplate never tires of mentioning and which, to be fair, few rivals can match. It tours more extensively than almost any cultural institution of its size, by its own count to all 50 states and some 45 countries. A gala honoring a transatlantic star of stage and screen fits that self-image neatly: national in reach, theatrical in instinct.
The chairs
The society column, of course, lives in the list of names on the invitation, and this one is a reliable read. BroadwayWorld reports that the Gala Grand Chairs are Sloan Lindemann Barnett, Emily and Laila Blavatnik, and Julia and Mary Julia Koch. That is two mother-daughter pairings plus a third patron, which is how dynastic arts patronage increasingly looks: shared credit, multiple generations, one table.
The Koch name, of course, is also on the building. The theater, home to New York City Ballet’s seasons and ABT’s fall engagements, is named for David H. Koch, Julia Koch’s late husband, whose gift underwrote its renovation. There is something pleasingly circular about the family chairing a gala in the house that bears its name, a bit like hosting dinner at your own restaurant.
A crowded Thursday
ABT’s Oct. 29 is not the only party in town that night. The calendar has a way of stacking its galas like dominoes in the final week of October, and the honoree list across the city that evening is long enough that a determined socialite with a driver could plausibly hit two events before midnight. ABT’s advantage is the curtain time. At 6:30, the performance starts early enough that guests can see the full program, dine and still have time to change wings for a Saturday parade.
Tickets and tables are available through the company’s Fall Gala page. For those not on the guest list, the more economical way to see these dancers is a regular ABT performance. For those who are, a word of advice from the program itself: if you are seated near the Devil in the de Mille, keep your virtue close.
The City Politic has reached out to American Ballet Theatre and to representatives for Cynthia Erivo for comment, and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, by Don Ramey Logan via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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