E-Mail This Article to a Friend Snow job; growing pains (continued)

OVER AT THE COLONIAL THEATRE, meanwhile, Boston Ballet is making the best of this year’s smaller stage, smaller orchestra pit, and smaller audiences by giving us new sets, new costumes, new lighting, and new choreography and promising a more coherent story line. The handsome new scrim looks over the snow-covered gabled rooftops of Nürnberg in a blue moonlight that illuminates the two decorated Christmas trees outside the arched, mullioned windows of the Silberhaus ballroom and also Godfather Droßelmeier’s clock tower; first we visit his workshop, where in front of the huge clock face (it echoes the one in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) Droßelmeier puts the finishing touches on his Nutcracker, and then the Silberhaus parlor, where Fritz and Clara are trying to look through the keyhole into the ballroom, where the tree and the presents await. In this version, Clara’s dream is less sugar-coated: she and everyone else are tiny figures under the tree (you can just see the lowest branches and a huge orange ornament), and Droßelmeier’s Harlequin and Columbine and Bear are malevolent figures who chase her around the stage. The Nutcracker is also a more adult figure: once the Mouse King is dispatched, he turns into the Cavalier who’ll dance with the Sugar Plum Fairy in act two. The balloon that used to ferry Clara and the Nutcracker to the Kingdom of Sweets is now a giant snowflake. And at the end, instead of flying off in a balloon or a snowflake, Clara wakes from her dream and holds up her Nutcracker and wonders what’s real and what’s not.

Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen has brought some nice small touches to act one: the game the children play in the parlor; the dead mouse that the little-boy guests bring to the party (the Governess has to carry it out); Herr Silberhaus and Droßelmeier discussing the latter’s late arrival (his watch, it seems, is on the fritz); Fritz’s palpable disappointment at getting a book as a present; the dancing lesson the Governess gives Clara; the way the children reject the Nutcracker but Clara embraces it; the polka Grandfather and Grandmother break into in the midst of the polonaise; the watch that the departing Droßelmeier gives to a now delighted Fritz; the shadowy presence of the mice as they creep under the tree; the conception of the Mouse King as an anti-Droßelmeier.

But there are some puzzling decisions as well. We used to have a budding romance between the Maid and the Delivery Boy; now those characters are gone and the Governess has only her one moment with Clara. Grandfather and Grandmother also are now mostly window dressing. Next to the little boys’ Pierrot outfits and the little girls’ pantalettes, the gentlemen’s formal wear and the ladies’ décolletage gowns look like refugees from another production, and you can hardly tell Herr and Frau Silberhaus from the guests. For press night last Thursday, Nissinen cast two company members, Misa Kuranaga and Benjamin Griffiths, as Clara and Fritz; dancing on pointe, Kuranaga was exquisite, but the character wasn’t noticeably older, and Griffiths towered awkwardly over the other boys. The Bear does more posturing and less dancing than ever, and it’s not clear whether he’s supposed to be ferocious or not. Clara’s sugar toys run out under the tree for no better reason than to be carried off by the mice. The battle is a chaotic mess, and afterward, a silver backdrop descends, leaving the Snow King and Queen and the snowflakes in a void of an enchanted forest: it’s more disconcerting than enchanting. The LED lighting from Color Kinetics looked harsh and cheap on press night but softened thereafter.

Concepts aside, Boston Ballet’s Nutcracker is the one that’s always been about the dancing, and the biggest reason to go this year is to see it close up. Lorna Feijóo’s Sugar Plum has all the gears of Michael Schumacher’s Formula One Ferrari, phrasing the piqué and chaîné turns in her manège with dizzying nuance. What she didn’t have last weekend was the right partner: next to her polo pony, Carlos Molina’s giraffe was elegant but inert and a little stiff. Sunday, Adriana Suárez was more formal and regal; Mindaugas Bauzys was lithe and focused as her Cavalier but, again, no connection. Romi Beppu’s highly articulated Dew Drop never lost its center; Melanie Atkins’s had less physical detail but the same crisp vulnerability. Beppu was sinuous and equally delectable in Coffee with Nelson Madrigal; Atkins was sensuous and equally crisp in Chocolate. Larissa Ponomarenko was her usual classy and sophisticated self as the Snow Queen; no chemistry with Snow King Madrigal, however. More partnering problems cropped up in the Snow King and Queen of Pavel Gurevich and Sacha Wakelin: she got way out of perpendicular on one supported turn and then fell during another. But kudos to Suárez and Bauzys for their Coffee, Kathleen Breen Combes for radiant firepower as Columbine and in Tea, Jared Redick for his split jumps and tours à la seconde in Russian, Dylan Tedaldi for his personable Fritz, and Molina for his vivid mime recall of the battle.

The Boston Ballet Orchestra sounds remarkably lifelike given that half of the players are under the stage and watching the conductor on a video screen. Jonathan McPhee confirms his mastery of Tchaikovsky’s score, and Mark Churchill, who’s sounded rote in the past, is becoming quirky — some good, some odd — instead, an improvement.

Next year, the Ballet will take its Nutcracker to the Opera House, where it will have to decide which elements of its traditional production and its new one to include. On my shopping list: better characterizations (let those dancers loose), better partnering relationships (not so much technical as emotional), and a little atmosphere (the choreography shouldn’t expect to be the whole show). The road to a more perfect Nutcracker is, like any artistic journey, a perilous and painful one, but at least it’s an adventure. Radio City Christmas Spectacular is just a dead end.