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Philadelphia Ballet opened its 2026-27 season on a festive note Thursday at the Academy of Music with \u201cStars and Stripes Forever!,\u201d a quartet of works celebrating America\u2019s Semiquincentennial<\/a>. It was a program of ballet fireworks, mostly featuring its principal dancers.<\/p>\n All four pieces were created during the 20th-century ballet expansion in the United States, when George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were laying down the landscape of choreography. The fourth piece was by Eliot Feld, who had a ballet company in New York (and in his teenage years played Baby John in the movie West Side Story).<\/p>\n It\u2019s a patriotic program but one that feels more period piece than political, set in the theater where John Philip Sousa\u2019s \u201cStars and Stripes Forever\u201d had its premiere in 1897.<\/p>\n The program opened with Fancy Free, which Robbins set to music by Leonard Bernstein in 1944, for what is now American Ballet Theatre. It was the precursor to the Broadway musical and movie On the Town, so it may look familiar to people who haven\u2019t seen the ballet before. It\u2019s a comedy about four sailors on leave who meet three women whom they try to charm.<\/p>\n Arian Molina Soca, Jack Thomas, and Nicholas Patterson outdid themselves in these roles, both as dancers and actors. Molina Soca and Thomas have had many starring roles. But it was a breakout role for Patterson, a soloist, who \u2014 having survived a series of double air turns into Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-style jump splits \u2014 is surely a rising talent in the company.<\/p>\n Feld\u2019s Variations on \u201cAmerica\u201d is short and delightful, and on Thursday night was a pas de deux for Ashton Roxander and Yuka Iseda, both of whom were breaths of fresh air. The music is by Charles Ives and William Schuman, and the dancers are the Liberty Bell, cannons, and general spitfires. There were a few moments Thursday when Iseda\u2019s very fast pirouettes nearly got the best of her, and the pair\u2019s final lift was a struggle. But the overall impression was strong, entertaining dancing.<\/p>\n The last two pieces were both Balanchine, starting with the concert version of Who Cares? to a series of songs by George and Ira Gershwin. It was danced by Sterling Baca and three women: Thays Golz, Dayesi Torriente, and Sydney Dolan (who had been injured most of last season), all of whom took on the tricky technical steps with ease and sparkle.<\/p>\n The final piece on the program is the showstopper, Balanchine\u2019s Stars and Stripes, also set to Gershwin. This is a full company piece with tutus, military-style uniforms, and necessary precision. Two more soloists proved themselves here: Lucia Erickson and Gabriela Mesa. It was impossible not to smile.<\/p>\n As an added treat, Philadelphia Ballet\u2019s music director, Beatrice Jona Affron<\/a>, who has already taken a job with New York City Ballet, was back at the baton (and will be for part of the Nutcracker season as well).<\/p>\n