E-Mail This Article to a Friend No more Nutcracker? The Wang Center evicts a Boston holiday tradition, plus "The Untrained Catastrophe" at the Zeitgeist Gallery

From the Arts Editor’s desk: The Wang and the Ballet

The ballet world was rocked last Friday morning when it was reported that, beginning next year, the Wang Center intends to replace Boston Ballet’s The Nutcracker, which has been a Boston holiday institution for the past 35 years, with the Rockettes’ "Radio City Christmas Spectacular." "Are they nuts?" screamed the Boston Herald’s front-page headline; the staider Globe settled for "Wang ousts Nutcracker for next year."

Why should The Nutcracker’s having to find a new venue be such a big deal? For starters, the company’s sets were constructed for the Wang Theatre; there’s no guarantee they’ll fit another house. And then, other houses in Boston are few and far between. The Colonial, the Wilbur, the Shubert, the Cutler Majestic, and the Copley Theatre are too small. The Hynes Convention Center hosted The Nutcracker back in 1982, when the Wang Theatre was undergoing renovation; I doubt many veteran balletgoers have fond memories of that production. The refurbished Opera House, which is set to open next with a touring production of The Lion King, is operated by Clear Channel, a commercial for-profit organization (both the Wang Center and Boston Ballet are non-profits) that is not likely to welcome The Nutcracker. The new convention center that will open next year in South Boston has been mentioned; at this point one can only guess at how suitable it will be.

What’s at stake here isn’t just the survival of Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker, it’s the survival of the company itself. It’s no exaggeration to say that without The Nutcracker, ballet as we know it would not exist. Particularly in America, performances of Tchaikovsky’s Christmas classic have underwritten the rest of many companies’ seasons. Benefitting from this city’s fondness for holiday institutions (the Pops’ Fourth of July on the Esplanade, the Handel and Haydn Society’s Messiah, First Night), Boston Ballet built its Nutcracker into the most successful in the world. At the production’s peak, in the mid ’90s, some 140,000 tickets were sold to 50 or so performances. Last year, attendance fell to about 115,000. Competition from Beauty and the Beast at the Colonial was cited as one reason; there was also a general falling-off in Nutcracker attendance around the country. The company cancelled the final week of its season-ending Romeo and Juliet, laid off some staff, and trimmed its budget by $3.5 million.

The success of its Nutcracker had enabled Boston Ballet to program seasons that were the envy of every North American company outside New York; last year’s relative failure was a reminder that this is not the most solid foundation on which to build a ballet organization. A bigger problem for Boston Ballet is that the company is unusually dependent on ticket sales for its income. Most companies aim for a two-to-one ratio of contributed to earned income; the norm at Boston Ballet has been almost the reverse.

New executive director Valerie Wilder, who came here last summer from the National Ballet of Canada, is addressing both problems, but she’ll need time, especially to raise money in a city not noted for public or private generosity toward the arts. And if in 2004 Boston Ballet has to move its Nutcracker to a less congenial theater, it’s likely to lose more money. Which would almost certainly lead to a reduction in the size, and the quality, of the company.

This should be a matter of serious concern to Mayor Thomas Menino. Boston is blessed with a company that can rival San Francisco Ballet and Houston Ballet as the third-finest in the US, after New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Boston Ballet achieved that distinction on the financial strength of its Nutcracker and the acumen of Bruce Marks, its managing and artistic director from 1985 through 1996. Without the revenue that The Nutcracker has provided, it will be difficult for the company to maintain that status. Ticket sales for regular programs will never do it — Boston is, after all, nowhere near the third-largest city in America.

One would have thought that the Wang Center’s non-profit status would require it to accommodate the non-profit Ballet — which is not to say the Wang couldn’t have proposed a re-negotiation of the rental rate. The statement released on behalf of the Wang board insisting that the Ballet "has been, and continues to be, a valued resident company in our theater, as we hope and expect them to be for many years into the future" had to raise eyebrows: what value can the Wang place on a company whose one big moneymaker it’s just evicted? And if the Wang has no legal responsibility to Boston Ballet, what about the moral responsibility to foster and support Boston institutions? Don’t the downtown theaters already give us enough touring revivals? Eyebrows will also have been raised by reports that the Wang is hoping to sign an eight-year contract with the Rockettes. Bostonians have returned to The Nutcracker year after year because it’s a family production, and because the different dancers make it a different show. (Also because, as comparison with the half-dozen Nutcrackers available on video suggests, Boston’s is not only the most-seen but also the best.) The Rockettes will have less to offer children, and it’ll be the same thing year after year. Will Bostonians keep coming back?

If the Wang Center will not — or can not (some clarification from the board as to why this decision was a financial necessity would be welcome) — provide a home for Boston Ballet that includes the company’s Nutcracker, then the city will have to decide whether it’s going to let a cultural institution of international repute go down the drain. Back in the summer of 2000, when the Red Sox were campaigning for a new ballpark and the city and state were offering in excess of $300 million in support, Mayor Menino stood up in front of the USS Constitution at Boston Academy of Music’s free outdoor H.M.S. Pinafore and told the audience, "I’m not just the baseball mayor, I’m the arts mayor." Now, the arts mayor has an opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. Boston has two major arts institutions of international standing, the Boston Symphony and the Museum of Fine Arts. Both have had more than a hundred years to establish themselves. Boston Ballet has the potential to join them, and in time the company will have to generate its own private support, but for the moment it needs public assistance. If the Wang Center is too large and too commercial to be an appropriate home, then the city should consider building a theater for dance and opera, as Houston has done.

Boston has never done anything to deserve a ballet company this big or this good, but we got it anyway. Now, if action isn’t taken, we may lose it. The international arts world will be waiting to see whether Boston lets the world’s most popular Nutcracker go homeless, and whether it lets one of America’s finest ballet companies go unsupported. We already lost game seven to the Yankees. Our biggest and best daily newspaper is owned by the New York Times. Do we have to trash Boston Ballet so we can watch the Rockettes?

— Jeffrey Gantz

"The Untrained Catastrophe"

It’s been two years, one month, and about three weeks since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. And according to Cambridge-based painter Robert Moeller, now is the time for an exhibit in which artists reinterpret the events of September 11. Curated by Moeller, "The Untrained Catastrophe" involves 12 artists, one night, two galleries, and multimedia, and it’ll take place this Wednesday from 7 to 11 p.m. at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square and at 108, a few blocks away in Somerville.

The timing of the exhibit "is not specific to any anniversary," Moeller says. "I didn’t want to peg it to anything. It’s not a memorial, and it’s designed so it didn’t fall on any specific date." Where people were at the moment when the towers went down is not the point, he continues — "The Untrained Catastrophe" is "more about the reality of the event and how time and societal filters have changed how we think about it."

Moeller asked the artists to reinterpret September 11 with the image of the stairwells of the Trade Center towers as an entry point. In photographs, sculpture, sound art, painting, and drawings, they use the stairwells as "a vertical metaphor of people going up and down and never arriving or departing. It’s about limbo." September 11 itself, he says, is in limbo: we haven’t arrived at an interpretation. And the way it’s been interpreted so far "has been terrible and the consequences enormous." He talks of the victims of the attack, the people who were hurt or killed or who lost the ones they loved, and how the Bush Administration has co-opted their identities, relegating them to a state of limbo: "Even though we’ve taken great strides in explaining who these people were," he points out, referring to the New York Times’ "Profiles in Grief," "these people became part of the propaganda machine. The Administration uses their identities to justify war." Just as the stairwells serve as a metaphor, the dual locations of the exhibit stand in for the two towers. To experience the full show, you have to go to both locations.

"It’s a bitch to get your head around," Moeller concedes when explaining the premise of his exhibit. "This will be challenging. But that’s a good thing. We all lead such complacent fat-boy lives, it’s good to get jolted."

"The Untrained Catastrophe" takes place Wednesday, November 5, from 7 p.m. to 11 at the Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street in Cambridge, and at 108, 108 Beacon Street in Somerville. Admission is free; for more information call (617) 441-3833 or (617) 876-6060.

— Nina MacLaughlin