Some stories get better with age. In ballet, when the timelessness of a great fairy tale meets the ephemeral nature of dance, you end up with a ''Swan Lake,'' a work that never loses its ability to enchant. Unfortunately, and all too frequently nowadays, that meeting is a matter of reaching for the moonlight. More often story ballets like the Paul...
More than any other ballet company in the world, New York City Ballet has the marriage of music and dance written into its constitution. Elsewhere you may find dancing that's just as musical, perhaps even more so. (Among the world's troupes today, the Royal Ballet in London at its best is probably the most musically responsive.) But only at City...
Paul McCartney's first ballet score, ''Ocean's Kingdom,'' is in no way an important addition to the corpus of ballet music, but it deserves a better staging than the one it's been given by New York City Ballet. Never less than agreeable, it has plenty of color and melody. Curiously, it sounds as if it had been composed in the neo-Romantic era...