Now I want to see The Nutcracker again.
Every time I see it, the little boy playing the brat brother Fritz steals the first act. The kid in the movie has such great moments, like trying to get the girls to pick him as a partner in the march and he ends up dancing with his mother, like the brush up against Drosselmeyer's nephew and trying to start a fight, like hs constant attempts for attention and gifts, and Balanchine gives him a great exit at the end of the party trying to hide a friend to stay over and his father carrying him off to bed. That same attention to detail is everywhere. There's none of that in the Royal Ballet production, just a lot of fussiness: the Royal Ballet Drosselmeyer doesn't come near Bart Cook's loving godfather at City Ballet. He spends too much time twirling his cape and throwing glitter like he's playing Mame and singing "It's Today."
DR elmore - Have you been reading about the new ABT production that's currently running out at BAM?
No, but I would love to see it even though I did read several weeks ago that it is very nontraditional. When I was doing BABES IN TOYLAND in Houston in 1991, I wanted to see the Houston Ballet production, which everyone in Houston said was great. The only production I've seen that are nearly as good as Balanchine's is the Joffrey Ballet production around 1988 or so and the San Francisco Ballet production, but I think Balanchine's iis near definitive because it has so much going right. I don't like his moving the Sugar Plum Fairy's variation from the
pas de deux to the beginning of Act Two because it destroys the compositional layout of the sequence, but that's a real minor quibble. He knows exactly what he's doing and that's creating a ballet about two parties, one a
gemutlich cozy middleclass European family gathering created with great attention to detail, and the other a fantasy party at the court of the Sugar Plum Fairy involving Christmas tree angels, dancing marzipan, sugarplums and peppermint sticks, and the other great ensemble number, the Waltz of the Flowers, with those dazzling Karinska dresses of layers of rose colors ranging from pink to deep red. It's absolutely stunning in the theatre. Balanchine knows it's not a children's ballet, it's a ballet for an audience to remember their childhood.
