Kids' turn

That other Nutcracker in town

by Marcia B. Siegel

THE NUTCRACKER, Music by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Choreography and design by José Mateo. Set design by Roger LaVoie. Lighting design by Stoney Cook. Presented by Ballet Theatre at the Emerson Majestic Theatre through December 26.

The best thing about Ballet Theatre's Nutcracker is the children. In fact, this production centers on children in a way that more ambitious versions of the classic fairy-tale ballet seldom do.

Famous Nutcrackers, from the ultimate version at New York City Ballet on, feature scads of little folk in perfect, disciplined displays of pre-professional abilities. They're miniatures of the grown-up dancers their teachers expect them to become, and we appreciate their prowess. But there's something to be said for kids who look like kids when they're not aspiring to be gold-medal winners or smart-ass brats in a sit-com.

The Nutcracker's first-act party scene would seem to be a perfect opportunity for childish antics, but surprisingly few productions permit naturalism to mix with impersonation and formality. Ballet Theatre's kids don't take themselves so seriously, they don't look actor-y. They try to be good and do the required choreography, but there isn't much of it, fortunately, so they can relax. When they play games, get into mischief, gather expectantly around someone who's giving out presents, they look interested. They look individual. They look convincing.

Ballet Theatre has three casts of children, but the one I saw was headed by Wendy Shinzawa, whose age I couldn't begin to guess but who's listed as a member of Ballet Theatre's YouthWorks company. Dancing on pointe, she was a composed but credible Clara, the little girl who dreams all the Christmas toys come to life. With the sympathetic Shinzawa as hostess, the children actually dominate the first act. The parents stay in the background, and though Dr. Drosselmeyer (played by the choreographer, company director José Mateo) flounces around pulling handkerchiefs out of his sleeve and mechanical dolls out of boxes, his bravado doesn't imply the powers to create a magic kingdom.

The 10 pint-sized mice -- there are no big mice in this production -- scurry around, fainting and grinning. They know they're silly and cute, and their parents are in the audience, loving them. They're a great success, and Clara doesn't seem overly scared of them. The Rat King (Jim Banta) wears a crown and an orange vest over BVDs, and we don't take him seriously either. He's one maladjusted grown-up who's easily defeated by Clara and the Nutcracker Prince (Julian Reyes) while the mice duke it out with platoons of toy soldiers not much bigger than they are. None of the combatants is hurt in the battle except the Rat King, who's quickly disposed of by a work party of cadets.

The children hold their own in the second act, too, as angels and cherubs (this Kingdom of the Sweets is apparently located in or near Heaven) and as the 12 Polichinelles hiding under the skirts of Mother Ginger. When Clara and the Prince arrive at the Kingdom, he tells the story of their encounter with the mice, and through some trick of the imagination, the soldiers come tramping through with some mice they've taken prisoner.

These anecdotes could easily become campy, but they don't. It's precisely the performers' lack of knowingness that's so refreshing. What I'm saying is that this Nutcracker looks like a school recital, and school recitals have a lot of charm. Ballet Theatre wants to be seen as an alternative classical company in Boston, but to me this is a stretch. I don't know where or what it performs the rest of the year; this annual production is, I think, the company's only regular appearance in town. It has many soft spots, and I don't mean it should have to compete with the extravaganza across the street.

The dancing that we wait for in the second act -- the Sweets ensembles and variations -- was extremely uneven in quality, from the superhuman spins and jumps and scissorlegs maneuvers of Jae Kwak in the Trepak to the Chinese twins in Tea, one of whom fell off point and couldn't keep up with her partner. The ballerina parts were taken by dancers with a wide range of backgrounds and experience, and the ensembles seemed not to have bonded thoroughly enough to render the music as a unit.

Mateo's choreography is most notable in his work for the ensembles, the Flowers and Snowflakes, where he often divides the women into small alternating units. The logic of this is undercut, though, by dressing the groups in costumes of drastically different colors or line.

According to the Tchaikovsky scholar Roland John Wiley, Marius Petipa, the original choreographer, wanted Nutcracker to have a unity based on contrast. Ballet Theatre's production doesn't make sense of the varying and volatile forces contributing to it.