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Christmas packages
Nutcrackers and other holiday treats
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


What to give for Christmas is a problem performing companies can solve by establishing their own holiday show. Unwrapped annually, tweaked and tidied, taken in here and poufed out there, it becomes a reliable way to celebrate. Sometimes it even grows into a tradition — famously The Nutcracker. Some of us cringe at the very word Nutcracker, but two things about that venerable institution struck me this year. First, there are in fact alternatives, and then, even the Real Thing comes in many flavors. I sampled three shows and a DVD to see what the dancing spirit of Christmas 2005 looked like.

Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker, the longest-running local edition of the ballet classic, moved from its home last year at the Colonial Theatre into the Opera House. I liked seeing the production at the moderate-sized Colonial. The Opera House doesn’t make you think you’re looking through the wrong end of a telescope as does the Ballet’s customary stage, the Wang Theatre, but it’s not exactly cozy, either. One reason for The Nutcracker’s popularity is its track record as a moneymaking enterprise that can plug up the holes in a ballet company’s inherently leaky annual budget, and the Opera House does provide 2500 seats to be filled with paying customers.

Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker seems stretched between two conflicting goals. As a tradition it must remain the same, but marketing pressures demand novelty. The production spins off promotional activities and outreach events, and the ballet itself sprouts new features every year. By now the whole production has acquired so many bits and scraps that it looks cluttered, even unfocused. Fortunately, some of the old shtick has been dropped, like the tipsy grandparents, but the evening still seems more like a variety show than a ballet. The story takes a back seat to the anticipated arrival of the Teddy Bear, the goofy Mice, the campy Mother Ginger, the balloon, and of course the snowstorm.

Maybe the Nutcracker’s plot doesn’t matter and it’s all just an excuse for dancing and special effects. But there is a lesson there, about childhood’s fears and comforts and surprises, and the reassurance of a loving family that’s waiting for you when you wake up from your dreaming adventures. All of this gets anchored in the first scene, but you can hardly find it in Boston Ballet’s frenetic party goings-on.

Mikko Nissinen’s introductory street scene establishes a period and a place, but the realistic bustle and cheeriness of the characters is upstaged by one young man insistently doing ballet tricks to make the audience applaud. This year, donors and local personalities were invited to do walk-ons every night, and the audience was prompted to cheer them.

And who are the characters in the story? On the night I attended, the children, Clara and Fritz, were played by adult dancers. Misa Kuranaga was credible, but Michael Breeden looked at least 16, so who could believe his petulance over a doll? Viktor Plotnikov’s Drosselmeier raged and flounced through the entire ballet, so you wondered whether he imagined himself the children’s friend, their benevolent uncle, or a weird acquaintance who’d dropped in by accident. It’s not easy to tell who Fritz and Clara’s parents are either. It seems the company hasn’t devoted much attention to refining these characters because the story takes a back seat to the spectacle.

Tchaikovsky’s wonderful score does cry out for dancing. Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker showcases the company’s range, from principal dancers to children, but this ever-evolving version lacks a real heart. On the other hand, English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s 1992 Nutcracker!, just issued in a 2003 performance on DVD by Kultur, is really all plot, with dancing that’s athletic rather than balletic.

Nutcracker! was Bourne’s first full-length choreography. More of a theater man than a dancer, he started dancing in his 20s, and his major works propose deconstructive versions of existing texts. His more mature but equally transgressive Swan Lake will play the Opera House in April. Bourne claims not to do parody; call them what you will, his productions assume we know the originals and will get pleasure from the comparison.

Nutcracker! is set in a Dickensian orphanage or a reform school. Clara’s flight into Sweetieland is an escape from a grim existence rather than an extension of a pleasant one. It tracks Clara’s crush on the boy who turns into a monster, then a Nutcracker prince. She sobs through his marriage to Princess Sugar; then, when she wakes up in the unaccountably coed dormitory, she finds the same boy in her bed. They tie some sheets together and make their escape out a window.

The cowering children and their masters all have glamorous alter egos in the second act, and in this reading, the whole scenario becomes a pre-pubescent sex fantasy centered on oral gratification. The characters are constantly, suggestively tasting, licking, sucking. The second act takes place in front of a huge pink gullet. Each of the divertissements suggests a different romantic possibility for Clara: the exotic Spanish dancers, the epicene lounge lizard Coffee, the hunky footballers. The grand pas de deux is a choreographed epic of two people surrounding, inhaling, ingesting, consuming each other. Bourne whisks in passing references to the British class system and British culture, too. The Snowflakes scene is an extended riff on a beloved ballet icon, Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, and there are ballet bits quoted throughout.

Bourne’s whole style is burlesque, music-hall acting and dancing, and you have to go along with that convention. The DVD was filmed in performance, perhaps at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, and it has all the usual liabilities of trying to squeeze a big production into a small screen. The camera brings you up closer than you’d be in the theater, but all the characters affect huge, fixed, open-mouthed expressions and exaggerated behavior. Bourne’s take on the ballet and the music seems to be that if you overdose on all this sugar, what you get to is pure love in a gray world. I’d like to see this clever turnabout in a live performance, but probably not as a Christmas treat.

BalletRox’s Urban Nutcracker adopts another nontraditional approach to the classic, a contemporary setting that incorporates the resources of the whole community. I’ve never joined a more multicultural, multi-generational audience in Boston than on the Sunday afternoon I saw the show at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester. The Strand, by the way, is another grand old house that deserves to be spiffed up as have the Opera House and the Majestic in recent years.

Like its Boston Ballet cousin, Urban Nutcracker begins with a street scene — people hanging out, shopping, greeting their friends. Kids clump on and do a hefty step dance. Old guys drift in, actually looking like old guys, and fall comfortably into a doo-wop quartet. The characters gather: a single mom, her daughter, her father, the magician Drosselmeyer and his hyperactive assistant Minimeyer. They all repair to the family’s house for a party.

That’s where the plot pretty much evaporates, but it doesn’t matter. The rest of the performance is an eclectic stream of dances: tap, moonwalking, ballet, acrobatics, hip-hop, ribbon dances, even an ensemble of kids bouncing in unison on big blue polka-dotted beachballs. Director Anthony Williams intersperses the recorded Tchaikovsky score with Duke Ellington’s suave Nutcracker variations, and the whole thing hangs together beautifully. I loved it all.

Another community show with a different mission marked its 25th anniversary at Robsham Theater of Boston College. Developed by the Reverend Robert VerEecke, A Dancer’s Christmas is a pageant in three parts: a Nativity scene, a mediæval celebration, and a suite of dancing carols, with a large cast of professionals, students, and children.

What was so fine about both these community works was seeing people performing what they can do best, in their own ways, and with a sense of involvement in the whole effect. The audiences, mostly but not exclusively their friends and families, gave them affectionate ovations, not at all the automatic response that clicks on at the end of the slickest professional show. If there’s a Christmas spirit, or any inspiration, to be found in the theater, these are the places we can find it.


Issue Date: December 30, 2005 - January 5, 2006
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