I've come to understand the sacred nature of that annual rite of passage, "The Nutcracker," after sitting through a middling performance at a local studio and getting all misty eyed a few years back. Because the ballet takes us both backward -- often to our own first ballet experiences and also to our own fond family holiday season recollections -- and forward as "The Nutcracker" has become a sacrement and a milestone in the lives of so many. While it's a remembrance of things past, "The Nutcracker," too, is a ode to the future. The young dance students playing the awkward angels, the gawky snowflakes, the bumbling clowns all aspire to the grown-up grace of the Sugar Plum Fairy and the adventurous imagination of Clara or Marie or whoever the young girl-child/woman is in your version of choice.
This season I sought out the underside of "The Nutcracker": what drives people, especially dancers and ballet directors, nuts about this ever-present ballet nugget. Whether it's the ubiquity of the music, the insanity of casting, or the frustrations of dealing with a hundred pushy stage-parents, for some even those complaints are not enough to set aside the ballet, even for a year. Just a few brave ballet folk would speak on record about things that drive them nuts about "Nutcracker." The ballet remains that sacred. A shortened version of my article (excerpt below) appears in The Washington Post Weekend.
"'The Nutcracker' drives plenty of people nuts.
Tchaikovsky was miserable composing the score. Marius Petipa fell ill while choreographing it, bowing out mid-rehearsal. Antonietta Dell'Era, the first Sugar Plum Fairy in 1892, was described as a 'heavy, large, unpretty, ungraceful dancer.' And reviews were dismal: " 'Nutcracker' can in no event be called a ballet," one critic opined after its premiere in St. Petersburg, Russia. 'It does not comply with even one of the demands made of a ballet.' Another wrote: 'The production of such 'spectacles' . . . is an insult . . . and may soon easily lead to the ruin of the ballet.' Ouch."
