Boston Ballet’s ‘The Nutcracker’ brings classic holiday magic
Twenty years after Jennifer Fisher’s 2003 book appeared, America is still “Nutcracker Nation,” the country that’s taken Tchaikovsky’s holiday ballet to its heart. And nowhere more so than in Boston. This year, Boston Ballet is offering 45 performances of its “Nutcracker” at the Citizens Bank Opera House. Meanwhile, the touring “Nutcracker! Magical Christmas Ballet” will play the Boch Center Wang Theatre Dec. 7. United Dance’s “Extraordinary Nutcracker” will be presented at Cambridge’s Multicultural Arts Center Theatre just after that, and City of Boston Ballet will bring Tony Williams’s “Urban Nutcracker” back to the Boch Center Shubert Theatre starting mid-month.
The “Urban Nutcracker” is an example of how American versions have branched out: it weaves Duke Ellington into the Tchaikovsky score and adds hip-hop, swing, tango, flamenco, jazz, Broadway, and tap to the traditional ballet vocabulary. Boston Ballet, however, has never strayed far from the scenario of the ballet’s source, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 novella “Nutcracker and Mouse King.” The time is 1816 or thereabouts; the place is a German town much like Hoffmann’s Nürnberg. Herr and Frau Silberhaus are hosting a Christmas Eve party, and the title character is the nutcracker that their daughter Clara receives as a present from her uncle Drosselmeier. When Clara saves her nutcracker from an army of wicked mice, the toy soldier transforms into a prince, and together they travel to his Kingdom of the Sweets.
There’s a social dimension to artistic director Mikko Nissinen’s current production. We see street urchins begging for hot chestnuts and comforting one another. A chap dances for coins; then everyone enjoys the show Drosselmeier puts on in the picture window of his toy workshop. Clara, in a handsome powder-blue coat and bonnet, buys a posy from a young flower seller. But when the set opens to reveal the opulent, russet-brown Silberhaus drawing room and expensively outfitted party guests arrive, the urchins are left out in the cold.
Inside, there’s plenty to catch your eye. You might be surprised to learn that a rabbit was part of the original 1892 production in St. Petersburg. Here you first see it winking and waving at Drosselmeier in his shop; then it turns up as the gift Clara’s parents give her older brother. Fritz flings the stuffed animal away in disgust, but it returns in the battle scene, first rescuing Clara’s gingerbread man from the hungry mice and then flattening an entire enemy cohort. Some thought went into the mice’s entrance as well: two of them assume yoga poses and a third replicates Michelangelo’s “Night.” In Hoffmann’s story, Drosselmeier is a watchmaker, so it’s ironic that he should come late to the party and get into a discussion with Clara’s father over who has the more accurate timepiece. At the end of the evening, he bestows his errant watch on a delighted Fritz.
Friday’s opening night saw a number of returnees from last year. Company
principal Chisako Oga has played Clara the past three years now, and though I miss the days when Boston Ballet School students had the role, there’s no faulting Oga’s airy jetés, or the way she embraces the nutcracker as if it were a first boyfriend. John Lam has always been one of the company’s best Drosselmeiers, mischievous with the adults but totally at ease with the children. Lawrence Rines Munro and Daniela Fabelo were back as the gallivanting Harlequin and the clockwork Ballerina Doll, and so were a lovable Madysen Felber and Daniel Cooper as the ditzy grandparents who, bored with the stately, evening-ending “Grandfather Dance,” break into a zippy polka that sends them spiraling off in opposite directions.
Boston Ballet II member Aidan Buss danced Fritz on Friday. Tall and commanding, he was an affectionate brother, followed lively split jumps on his hobby horse with pristine double tours, and even did a nifty double take when he saw the bunny in his gift box. Henry Griffin as the crowdpleasing Bear got the first applause of the evening when he appeared in a theater box before the show even started. As the life-size nutcracker who leads Fritz’s toy soldiers, Patrick Yocum had the right wooden affect, and he was full of boyish wonder after being transformed into a prince. Jeffrey Cirio and Ji Young Chae brought speed, precision, and power to a mesmerizing Snow King and Snow Queen set against designer Robert Perdziola’s forest of silver birches.
Perdziola’s design for act two is a palace ballroom meant to conjure French “Sun King” Louis XIV and 18th-century artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Highlights here included a fluid, similarly mesmerizing Coffee from Lasha Khozashvili and Lia Cirio that made her upside-down split and the plank lift look easy; a Tea with Felber in total control of her rhythmgymnastics ribbons; a Mother Ginger (Alexander Nicolosi) with the usual cartwheeling Polichinelle; and a
Waltz of the Flowers whose Dew Drop, Lauren Herfindahl, mastered both her Italian and her Russian fouettés and had the phrasing to fill out the music’s slow tempos.
Yocum’s Nutcracker Prince gave an animated account of the battle, especially in his mime of the Mouse King; Viktorina Kapitonova’s regal Sugar Plum Fairy was a gracious mentor to Oga’s Clara. They brought big, majestic lifts to their Adagio, after which Yocum capped his tarantella variation with neat brisés volés. In her iconic celesta solo, Kapitonova went from pointing the music one moment to playing with it the next, and never mind that her traveling fouettés in the coda might have got a bit derailed.
How “The “Nutcracker” should end is always the question. Some versions simply have Clara heading back home. Boston Ballet’s production finds her back on the drawing-room sofa with her nutcracker, and it’s crowned by her ecstatic discovery, when she wakes, that maybe it wasn’t all just a dream.