The Nutcracker Chronicles: A Slice of San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO — The lobby of the War Memorial Opera House is already intensely theatrical in “Nutcracker” season, with a perfect tree not only beautifully decorated but also spotlighted. In the afterglow that follows the matinee, children and their parents linger a long time, and many photographs are taken. This, with Houston, is one of the two best-dressed “Nutcracker” audiences of my travels – and, if the attire is less spectacular than Houston, it’s more elegant.

It’s in this opera house that America’s first complete “Nutcracker” had its premiere, in 1944: the same version, choreographed by Willam Christensen, that I saw danced by Ballet West two weeks ago. One look at the dancers and I’m reminded that San Francisco Ballet is among the best companies in the world: finesse, elegance, polish, line, technique, ease. One look at the cast list and I’m aware that this is an exceptional matinee, with Sarah Van Patten and Tiit Helimets as the Queen and King of the Snow, Vanessa Zahorian and Taras Domitro as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her consort, and Elana Altman, Ricardo Bustamante, Val Caniparoli, Frances Chung and Pascal Molat in supporting roles.

Unfortunately, travel delays meant my flight to San Francisco was three hours late, and so I arrived only in time for the last few dances of Act 2. I regret this not just as a dancegoer but as a tourist: Helgi Tomasson’s production is set in the 1915 San Francisco World Fair.<

There is plenty to say even about the little I see. Martin West does some of the best conducting I have heard from him, and the company’s orchestra is a match for its dancers. This is neither the first nor second production in my recent experience to feature a dancing bear, but I hope it is the only one where the bear emerges from the skirts of Mother Ginger (here called Madame Du Cirque). Ms. Zahorian and Mr. Domitro are outstanding in the grand pas de deux, which features some prominent references to both the 1892 Ivanov and 1954 Balanchine versions.

But there and in the Waltz of the Flowers, Mr. Tomasson lets appealing dance ideas flounder blandly without building them into an architectural and musical array that would make them poetic or memorable. It’s confusing to have a Sugar Plum Fairy who dances none of the music that Tchaikovsky designated for her. Instead she leads the Waltz of the Flowers. Then young Clara steps through a Narnia-type door that transforms her into a ballerina (Ms. Zahorian). This alter ego device is set to a passage from the Sugar Plum adagio that’s taken out of context, right before the adagio then occurs. It’s a jarringly unmusical effect of structure.

I’m told 85 children appear in each performance here. Is this – surpassing Boston Ballet’s 83, Ballet West’s 65 and New York City Ballet’s 55 – a present-day “Nutcracker” record?

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The Nutcracker Chronicles: Elvis and the Mirlitons

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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The Nutcracker Chronicles: Clues to the Original Production

BOSTON — Some of the Russians who fled after the 1917 Revolution took little more than the clothes on their back. But a few took treasures to the West that Russia was loath to lose.

Among the most extraordinary was the collection of dance notation of the Imperial Theaters, brought by Nicholas Sergueyev (or Nikolai Sergeev), who had served as the regisseur of the ballet company of the Maryinsky Theater. With these, he mounted ballets like “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Giselle,” Swan Lake” and – yes – “The Nutcracker” in London and Paris. Today his notations are in the Harvard Theater Collection, the basis for several reconstructions and also major research, notably by the American music scholar and dance historian Roland John Wiley.

To understand most aspects of these texts, you need Russian and you need to be able to decipher the now outmoded Stepanov system of dance notation. I have neither. Some of the stage action was translated into English by Mona Inglesby, who owned these manuscripts for many years. So what do they reveal?

At the end of the party Frau Stahlbaum, Clara’s mother, turns to her husband and says, “Oh how tired I am” and he replies, “Me too” — a wonderfully human touch we seldom see onstage today.

Another notation records a 1909 performance led by the ballerina Olga Preobrazhenskaya as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Nicholas Legat as their cavalier — eight years after the death of the Sugar Plum’s choreographer, Lev Ivanov.

At the start of the Sugar Plum Fairy adagio, the script says, “The Fairy speaks.” This is startling by itself, since the Sugar Plum Fairy in most versions “says” nothing here, even in mime terms. But what does she say? We can’t tell. But in Inglesby’s handwriting, at the end of the pas de deux, are the lines: “He spoils me. He spoils me. I am in his good graces.” Are these the Fairy’s words?

Next “They kiss,” followed by “They bow to family.” What family does the Sugar Plum Fairy have? The Nutcracker and Clara, presumably. None of these stage directions has any equivalent in the choreography now shown — by the Royal Ballet among others — as Ivanov’s.

What even the untutored eye can see are the kaleidoscopic patterns of the Act 1 Snowflakes and Act 2 Flowers. Ivanov, who — unlike Balanchine and many others — choreographed most of the scene for the whole corps rather than subgroups, seems to have wanted his Snowflakes to become the crystalline outline of one individual snowflake then another. But there are other moments when five Snowflake rings wheel rapidly while another group runs to form two more circles. Likewise the Flower patterns suggest outer petals and inner stamens of one single flower, then several buds on tall stems.

We’ll never know enough about the 1892 premiere production. There are aspects of it that these notations don’t record (like the the apotheosis in Act 2, that — we know from contemporary accounts — showed bees, danced by girls from the Maryinsky School, before a hive). But these records give us clues to a “Nutcracker” different from any we see onstage today.

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The Nutcracker Chronicles: The Doctor Will Dance for You Now

A tango friend, despite claiming allergy to “The Nutcracker,” put me in touch with her friend Myron Schwartz, an oncologist based at Mount Sinai Hospital. His focus is the liver but he has another specialty as well: dancing a role in the party scene in “The Yorkville Nutcracker,” which this year runs Dec. 9-12 at the Kaye Playhouse.

I emailed him to ask about his stage career, and he explained that this is his fourth year taking part in this version of “The Nutcracker,” which is choreographed by Francis Patrelle and set at Gracie Mansion in 1895. Dr. Schwartz plays the Chinese consul and his character’s partner, Mrs. Theodore Havemeyer, will be played for the first time by his wife, Diana Pan. (She is “a real dancer,” the doctor wrote, and added, “Where Mr. Havemeyer is, lord knows!”) Their daughter, 6, is also taking part for the first time.

Dr. Schwartz, who first took ballet classes in 1999, goes back to class at the end of every summer to get ready. “Francis insists,” he wrote.

Here are more excerpts from his email:

“I get to do a little chassé turn and a chance to swing my partner and dosi-do. (I’m sure Francis would kill me for saying that, but I used to play square dances long ago in another life.)

“I have no illusions about being a serious dancer. But being part of the creative process is a great feeling; and I can’t deny that in company class the day of my first opening, I stood extra-straight and imagined, for a moment, that I could have been a performer.

“This year, though, will be extra special. Since the days when I started class, it has been a dream to dance onstage with Diana. Our dream will come true Dec. 9, and with our Hari [their daughter] stomping and playing a little Spanish Page to boot, well — what could be better than that?”

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