RACK OPEN OUR HOLIDAY ARTS GUIDE
San Francisco Ballet staged the first full-length production in the U.S.
More than a beloved ballet, “The Nutcracker” is a cultural touchstone that’s come to embody and signify all that Americans treasure about the holiday season. A gateway to dance and classical music for children, a wintertime ritual for families and a fiscal lifeline for dance companies large and small, the seemingly indestructible ballet has been endlessly riffed on, restaged and reimagined, multiplying exponentially over the decades. The Russian ballet’s march across the continent started 75 years ago in San Francisco, and looking back, it’s clear that its conquest of the United States was anything but preordained. The fledgling San Francisco Ballet Opera (as San Francisco Ballet was originally known) was looking to establish a dependable holiday hit in the midst of World War II when the company presented “Hansel and Gretel” in 1943, “and it didn’t go over well, as San Francisco audiences voted with their feet,” says Jennifer Fisher, associate professor of dance at UC Irvine. The author of “Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World” (Yale University Press), Fisher notes that when the San Francisco Ballet Opera presented William Christensen’s “Nutcracker” the following year, the ballet’s first full-length production in the United States, the company hedged its bet by pairing it with George Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes.” And in 1945, the company reverted to “Hansel and Gretel.” “No one ever has faith in ‘The Nutcracker,’ ” Fisher says, a dynamic that goes back to the ballet’s origins. While it arrived in the U.S. wrapped in the vaunted status of a Russian cultural export, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s original “Nutcracker” premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892 to mixed reviews, and it never earned an avid following at home. “Russians couldn’t do a ‘Nutcracker’ to save your soul,” Fisher says. “They made it all about the adults. It was an immigrant to this country. It came with a brand of the golden age of imperial ballet in Russia, but we did a lot for ‘The Nutcracker.’ Americans didn’t care there were too many children in the first act. We didn’t care if it was telling a story where one minute you’re in someone’s living room and the next you’re in a utopia.” But the company gave the ballet another shot in 1946, and it’s been a mainstay ever since. Balanchine’s iconic production deserves the lion’s share of the credit for turning “The Nutcracker” into an American institution, running annually in New York City ever since its 1954 premiere. But San Francisco Ballet did its part, proving that the magical story of a kitchen-implementturned-warrior set to Tchaikovsky’s enchanting score had staying power while establishing the ballet as a West Coast holiday ritual. About that score. Fisher argues that Disney paved the way for the ballet’s triumph by including selections from Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker Suite” in the groundbreaking animated film “Fantasia.” Originally released as a traveling roadshow in November 1940 and regularly presented in theaters over the next decade (often with specially installed proto-stereo sound systems), the film brilliantly renders fairies, fish, flowers, leaves and mushrooms in motion, in some cases using movements modeled on Ballets Russes dancers. Growing up in Iceland, San Francisco Ballet’s Helgi Tomasson didn’t encounter “The Nutcracker,” but he came to understand its enduring appeal while performing for Balanchine in the New York City Ballet. More than anything, he credits “the beautiful music and a story that’s really geared toward the family. “Little by little, people brought in children and grandchildren, and it became this tradition in this country, something we don’t see in Europe,” he says. “The explanation is nothing very brainy. It made people feel good.” Tomasson’s interpretation of the ballet exemplifies the way that its sturdy foundation affords new avenues into the work. Using Tchaikovsky’s complete, unadulterated score in the sequence intended by the composer, San Francisco Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” which runs from Dec. 11-27, has earned deservedly superlative marks since its premiere in 2004.
In an ingenious historical shift, he changed the setting from late 18th-century Europe to a Pacific Heights mansion in 1915. The date is significant, because San Francisco was abuzz with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which provides the inspiration for the second act dance travelogue. “I just imagined what it must have been for a child to go to that exhibition and see magical things from around the world,” Tomasson says. “Why wouldn’t that spark Clara’s imagination? It’s traditionally played in a middle European country, but I did some research and thought, why not? Now we have ‘The Nutcracker’ being so popular everywhere, it just made sense to place the first act in San Francisco.”