Compliments of the season

Boston Ballet delivers another warm and cozy Nutcracker

by Jeffrey Gantz

THE NUTCRACKER, Based on the story "Nutcracker and Mouse King," by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Music by Peter Tchaikovsky. Choreography by Bruce Marks, with additions by Daniel Pelzig and Sydney Leonard. Set design by Helen Pond and Herbert Senn. Costume design by David Walker. Lighting design by Mary Jo Dondlinger. With the Boston Ballet Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan McPhee. Presented by Boston Ballet, at the Wang Center, through January 4.

The winter holiday season invariably finds America in a retrenching mood. Every year, television offers us White Christmas, A Christmas Carol, It's a Wonderful Life, a Bob Hope special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Luciano Pavarotti in Montreal. And every year we tune in faithfully. Here in Boston, we don't just flock to Christmas traditions like Handel & Haydn's Messiah and Boston Ballet's Nutcracker, we rely on them. We'd react to their absence the same way the Fourth of July Esplanade crowd would go bonkers if it didn't get to hear "Stars and Stripes Forever" and the 1812 Overture.

Which is to say that if Boston Ballet gives us pretty much the same Nutcracker year after year, well, that's what we ask for. And if Boston Ballet's is a Nutcracker that eschews the darker side of the E.T.A. Hoffmann tale it's based on, instead pitching itself to children, well, we're all children at Christmas. Ballet in America -- and in much of the world -- is sustained by productions of The Nutcracker; without Tchaikovsky's holiday classic, Boston Ballet wouldn't be America's fourth-largest ballet company, and we wouldn't get to see Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet and new works at the level we do. Companies are free to inquire and explore the rest of the year. Christmas is for warm and cozy.

Boston Ballet knows all about warm and cozy. The opening scene of this Nutcracker is like a mug of mulled ale -- make that cider. Lighted windows peer at us like the cast of Cats from the cozy, close-set houses of a German Gothic town, all protected by a twin-spired cathedral and a waning crescent moon and blessed by falling snow. And the tableaux are holiday-comforting: the Christmas-tree seller haggling with the lamplighter; the Christmas-tree seller haggling with the father whose little girl on the sled tells him how much to offer; a couple (the Silberhauses?) buying hot chestnuts for their two well-behaved children; two not-so-well-behaved children throwing snowballs at Dr. Drosselmeyer and his nephew.

More familiar treats await inside. There's the fussbudget Governess -- she gets hers when Drosselmeyer plops his gloves down on her tray and they turn into a white dove. There's the overworked, underachieving Maid, who carries on with the delivery boy and exits post-party with a leftover glass of port after the Drosselmeyer-enchanted Christmas tree blinks at her. There's the doddering Grandmother, who, true to this production's Victorian-cluttered ethos, overdefines every moment; you can get your money's worth just by watching her, er, him. (Tony Collins has appeared in all 33 Boston Ballet productions of The Nutcracker and, as far as I can tell, has never been bored, or boring, for a second; Mayor Menino should give him the keys to the city.) For that matter, Grandfather is a story all by himself. He clearly has a thing for Grandmother (he must be Herr Silberhaus's father, and she's Frau Silberhaus's mother, or something like that), but note how the Governess has to wrest Fritz's hobby horse away from him, and how he starts blowing kisses to Drosselmeyer's mechanical Columbine because he thinks she's hitting on him (some sharpie in the company is alluding to another Hoffmann tale, "The Sandman"), and how when dinner is announced he (along with everyone else) forgets all about Grandmother, leaving her to fall asleep in her chair. He's just a kid at heart. But don't forget the pearl necklace he gives her -- he's a romantic, too.

You can't tell the same story -- even a story as good as this one -- every year and expect the necessary 140,000 people to show up. So over the past few seasons the company has done some tinkering: new costumes, new sets, new choreography. And there have been major improvements -- most notably in Drosselmeyer's expansion of the first-act set, with its alarming Caligari-like German Expressionist tilt; in the new costume for the Bear; and in the new brown tulle costumes for the limburger-munching Mice, who, squirrel-graceful, cuddly-cute, and all good will, remain the unacknowledged stars of the show. But things have been smoothed over, too. The party guests are now all cool pastel blues and greens. I miss the warmth of Christmas red, and the two little boys in kilts (a reference to the popularity of James Macpherson's Ossian in Germany). I miss the opposite-moving concentric circles the children formed at the end of their March and Galop; the Soldier and the Vivandière (okay, I know there'd be a riot if the Bear were replaced -- and don't overlook the way he waves goodbye, mechanically, with his right paw); and the way the toy cannon under the tree grew into a real one. And though the introduction of Drosselmeyer's Nephew is a welcome reversion to the Hoffmann tale, it doesn't work unless he's linked in some way with the Nutcracker, so that he can take his place as Clara's future husband.

I have more problems with the second act, which has been spruced up to a fault. Yes, Tea is less stereotypically Chinese, and the real-life Marzipan lambs (another audience favorite) improve upon the old wheel-toys. But everything is calculated to please in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way; there's nothing that wouldn't be acceptable to The Lawrence Welk Show. The Nutcracker segment of Disney's Fantasia has more edge -- and Fantasia is 55 years old.

Boston Ballet's dancers deserve better. Of the Sugar Plum/Cavalier couples I saw last in three (pre-press-night) performances weekend, only Jennifer Glaze and Devon Carney hit the mark. That was a surprise, because Carney has never impressed me with his technique, and Glaze usually looks solid but uninspiring. Then again, Carney, now in the twilight of his career, knows how to act, how to project. He's also apt to sacrifice himself to make his partner look good. And Glaze is learning from him. Result: memorable partnership. Just observe they way they react to the Nutcracker's miming of the battle: it's real theater. But the relative failure of Patrick Armand and Pollyana Ribeiro (so steamy in Romeo and Juliet this fall) and siblings Simon and April Ball (in a most creditable principal-role debut) suggests that the choreography, and not the dancing, is the problem.

Talk about steamy: Kyra Strasberg's Coffee and Emily Gresh's Dew Drop are sorely missed. It's not the dancers' fault -- they need choreography they can sink their teeth into. The best of what I saw last weekend: Larissa Ponomarenko's ever-amazing articulation (think Oksana Baiul at Lillehammer) as Dew Drop and the Snow Queen (and it's always a treat to see her dance with Viktor Plotnikov, her husband); Jennifer Gelfand's ever-amazing speed (think Johann Olav Koss at Lillehammer) in the same roles, and now she's added weight and phrasing; Sasha Dmochowski's Chocolate, breaking hearts left and right; Heidi Wolfe's Coffee -- she's no Denise Pons, but with more sinuous choreography she could be, and I've never seen anyone fly higher in the encore throw fish dive; and the entire Cossack troupe. Kudos, too, to Ribeiro and Gelfand for putting their all into the "minor" roles of Tea and Marzipan, respectively.

This Nutcracker is a thoroughly professional job throughout (and well played, by Jonathan McPhee and the Boston Ballet Orchestra, as few Nutcrackers are); if the dancers don't always rise to the occasion, that's because few occasions have been provided. Suggestions for Boston Ballet: re-read the Hoffmann story, re-view Fantasia, look at the eccentric-but-involving American Ballet Theatre video with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland, and send someone down to check out Balanchine's New York City Ballet version. Suggestions for everyone else: read the original Hoffmann tale (numerous storybook versions are available, but the one you want, no substitutes accepted, is the Ralph Mannheim translation with the Maurice Sendak illustrations -- these guys understand Hoffmann), and then go, go, go. Yes, this Nutcracker is pretty rather than probing, and it ought to be better. But if everything in Boston were this good, we'd have major-league opera and theater companies and the Red Sox and Patriots would be world champions.

| home page | what's new | search | about the phoenix | feedback |
Copyright © 1997 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.