Bah, humbug?

The Nutcracker critic turns Scrooge

by Jeffery Gantz

THE NUTCRACKER, Music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Choreography by Daniel Pelzig, Bruce Marks, Sydney Leonard, and Anna-Marie Holmes. 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 Theatre through January 2.

Let me make one thing clear: this year's production of The Nutcracker from Boston Ballet is not appreciably worse than the one 140,000 people enjoyed last year, or the year before. It's not even very different. What is different this year is the critic, who after writing six consecutive full-page Nutcracker reviews for this newspaper has finally, well, cracked. Maybe it's that treacherous seventh backward step the young hero of "The Hard Nut" takes after cracking the Krakatuk.

I should explain that there is, or at least there could be, a lot more to The Nutcracker than you see on stage. The source of the world's most popular ballet is an 1815 novella by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann called Nutcracker and Mouse King. This is a tale for adults as well as children, a story that strands us in the twilight zone between dream and reality. Hoffmann's owl-like demiurge, Godpapa Droßelmeier, is part mysterious magician, part hapless human being, a cranky clockmaker who regulates the timepieces in the household of his godchildren, Fritz and Marie (Clara in the ballet), but can't quite regulate time itself. Hoffmann's hero and heroine, the Nutcracker and Marie, are a misshapen, broken toy and an ordinary seven-year-old girl or, if you look at them the right way, a prince and princess -- dream defeating reality, love beating time.

All this is clarified by Droßelmeier's fairytale within the fairytale, "The Story of the Hard Nut," wherein a handsome young man named, of course, Droßelmeier uses his exceptionally strong teeth to crack the howitzer-proof Krakatuk nut and removes the Mouse spell that's made royal daughter Pirlipat hideously ugly. Alas, he fails to complete the spellbreaking procedure (that critical seventh step) and is turned into an ugly Nutcracker himself, whereupon the now lovely Pirlipat rejects him -- to listener Marie's dismay. At one point the Uncle Droßelmeier of this inner tale unscrews Pirlipat's hands and feet to see what's wrong, a troubling development that suggests we humans are all the marionettes of a powerful but not omnipotent puppeteer.

Where did all this dark, complex, adult fare go? Don't blame Boston Ballet -- The Nutcracker was sugarcoated from the very beginning, back in 1891. Ivan Vsevolojsky and Marius Petipa started not with the Hoffmann original but with the French translation by Alexandre Dumas, and they heaped on still more marzipan. The Nutcracker has been candytown ever since (despite Tchaikovsky's fully adult score). But it doesn't have to be that way. The American Ballet Theatre production that's preserved in the 1977 video with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland gives us an adolescent Clara who dances with her Nutcracker and suffers some of the pains of growing up. Maurice Sendak's design for the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Nutcracker (commemorated in Nutcracker: The Motion Picture) went back to the original, Sendak finding a soulmate in Hoffmann. Mark Morris's idiosyncratic, Mostly Mark version, The Hard Nut, preserves the inner fairytale; so does the 1990 animation The Nutcracker Prince. New York City Ballet's Nutcracker isn't all sugarplums either.

Boston Ballet has been tinkering with its Nutcracker for some four or five years now, and apart from the high sugar content, the recipe is showing the effect of too many cooks. The company's totally-in-control Godpapa Drosselmeyer is a handsome young man in a Hathaway eyepatch; Hoffmann's much more ambiguous Droßelmeier is not at all handsome -- and that's the point of the tale, Marie's capacity to find beauty in what seems ugly. Grandfather and Grandmother have no place at all in Hoffmann's narrative, and though Tony Collins has been a cherishable Grandma in drag for the past 34 years (and this is his last Nutcracker), having Grandfather totter into his second childhood just takes the spotlight away from Clara. What choreography there is no longer coheres.

Opening night this all looked flat as Clara's gingerbread man. April Ball brought crispness and warmth to her daffodil-like Dew Drop -- which is about all the choreography allows. Larissa Ponomarenko was as riveting as ever as Sugar Plum, and Giuseppe Picone was all panache as her Cavalier, but these blind-date pairings never produce much chemistry. And that's really the problem with the entire second act. In theory, the divertissements -- Chocolate, Coffee, Tea, etc. -- represent the romantic dreams as well as the gustatory delights of Clara and her Nutcracker Prince, but what we get here is a fast-food one-night stand.

I haven't forgotten that The Nutcracker altered the history of ballet, that without it ballet as we know it could hardly exist, and that any Nutcracker, Boston Ballet's included, has to be a family affair. But does that mean it has to treat everyone like children? Christmas classics from Hoffmann's Nutcracker to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol to O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" have conveyed the childlike wonder of being an adult. After all these years, maybe Boston Ballet can do the same.