MEMPHIS — More American history has taken place in Memphis than I’d realized. I knew a little about the blues and rock ‘n’ roll here – but, though I sharply remember the news of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, I’d forgotten it also happened here, at the Lorraine Hotel. The Memphis friend who gave me a guided tour of the city’s highlights included that and more in a packed morning itinerary. We also stopped at the Arcade Restaurant, where Elvis used to hang out and where I had prematinee brunch.
Later, in the splendid 1920s-era Memphis Orpheum, Ballet Memphis’s founder and artistic director, Dorothy Gunther Pugh, spoke about “The Nutcracker” in a speech before the curtain. In the context of a season associated with presents, she said, no other ballet is more about the art of giving, and that its heart is idealistic. A vulnerable young girl, Clara (as she’s called here), has performed an act of courage, and representatives of different peoples celebrate that.
This production – the choreography is attributed to Janet Parke, Karl Condon and Joseph Jefferies, and apparently somewhat revised each year – is conventional and, on the whole, good. The waltz music from Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” is added to Act 1 to give more dancing to the grown-ups. (At first it fits in remarkably well, though its brilliant conclusion is more spectacular than necessary for a middle-class Christmas domestic party.)
The dancing dolls Drosselmeyer brings to the party are Harlequin and Columbine, which are traditional, but also a very off-balance and vulnerable Pierrot, which isn’t. They’re all played so individually — by Benjamin Warner, Liliana Mulbach and especially Ben Delony (Pierrot) — that it’s a vivid episode.
Most of the “Nutcrackers” I’ve watched in Europe omit the Mother Ginger number. (Too vulgar for polite tastes?) Every American one I’ve seen has included her, this big, proud, happy mother played by a man with her vast crinoline from which eight children emerge. She’s almost always a star, and at Ballet Memphis she, too, is played by Mr. Delony: hilariously asleep as she sidles onstage, then overjoyed to meet the audience. (And she has not 8 children but 10.)
But overall there was too much nonsensical dancing. The Nutcracker wants a sword from Clara only, it seems, so that he can do multiple pirouettes with it. Later on, he raises her in big up-and-over lifts, apparently so that this well-brought-up girl in her nightie can show us her underwear.
Crystal Brothers is a stylish Sugar Plum Fairy, Virginia Pilgrim an accomplished if not always refined Dewdrop, but my eye was most drawn by Julie Marie Niekrasz, the lead Mirliton. The radiance of her posture makes me pay attention as she enters, and in her solo she shows very clearly how some steps stay on balance and others go off.
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