Nutcracker Prince out with injury

Houston Ballet principal dancer Connor Walsh, always an audience favorite, is out for the rest of the holiday season after injuring an ankle during the premiere performance of Stanton Welch’s new “Nutcracker” on Nov. 25.

It’s the second time a Houston Nutcracker Prince has gone down in recent memory. The first was in 2003, when Zdenek Konvalina crashlanded at about the same moment as Walsh, during the coda of the grand pas de deux with the Sugar Plum Fairy, near the end of the ballet.

“What a wild opening night it was,” Walsh wrote on Facebook, noting how Welch’s massive, new $5 million production has “stretched every part of this company to its very max.”

During his final series of barrel turns — big, circling jumps that take the body almost horizontal — Walsh landed badly and tore up an ankle.

As he tells it, “I became a bit overly ambitious … and felt something pop in my landing ankle. … The next 16 bars of music were a bit of a blur, but I do know that there was a pirouette that I had to switch to the other side and a dramatically long pose in tendu while I figured out what I may or may not be able to do.”

The tendu probably seemed longer to him than it actually was. Walsh didn’t grimace, though. It looked as if he had just become disoriented by the turns when he stepped into the big tendu pose and motioned to dancer Sara Webb in that ballet language that says, “Your turn.”

Not to give her a complex or anything, but Webb also was dancing the Sugar Plum role when Konvalina hurt himself. She was far across the stage both times.

Walsh covered his injury so well even Webb didn’t realize he was hurt. And he remains gracious to the core. He wrote, “Every injury I’ve ever had has made me smarter and stronger, and as hard as it is to not be performing with the company I look forward to the challenge of learning more about my body and coming back stronger than before.”

Bravo.