`NUTCRACKER' DELIGHTS WITH DANCING SNOWFLAKES, TOYS, 40 KIDS

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on November 28, 2005.

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- With its old-fashioned Christmas Eve party, a strange old uncle who might be a wizard, and a tree that grows to towering height, the New York City Ballet's production of George Balanchine's ``The Nutcracker'' remains the company's irresistible evergreen.

The corps de ballet of snowflakes leaps and swirls through a storm of white confetti. Toys come to life in the first act; sweets are animated in the second. Marauding mice are defeated in tragicomic battle. Not least, there's the confident proposal that a drama's hero and heroine can be under the age of puberty.

An enthusiastic audience of adults and splendidly dressed children, many of them awake way past their bedtime, greeted the opening last Friday of the company's annual five-week run at Lincoln Center.

Balanchine's ``Nutcracker'' has a direct link to the original version, choreographed in 1892 by Lev Ivanov for the grand classical dance company at the Maryinsky (later Kirov) Theater in St. Petersburg.

The libretto was based on E.T.A. Hoffmann's bizarre ``The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'' of 1816. The tale, moving from upper-middle-class family life to a hallucinatory dream, describes the first intimations of romantic love in the life of a girl still young enough to play with dolls. The radiant score, which survives being piped into shopping malls, was commissioned from Tchaikovsky.

Angels and Mice

Friday's performance was crisp, clean, and bright, cast with principals and soloists selected not so much for emotional resonance as for their dazzling technique.

Playing the Sugar Plum Fairy, Sofiane Sylve added a new softness and airiness to her formidable skill in daring plunges and rock-steady balances. In the role of Dewdrop, the diminutive Ashley Bouder boldly spun and soared as if impelled by an invisible engine.

Two virtuoso male soloists made Olympic-style feats look playful. As the Toy Soldier assigned flexed-foot jumps with beats and shifting-focus turns, Austin Laurent executed them blithely. Playing a politically incorrect ``Chinaman,'' touching his hands to his toes as he split his legs in the air, Daniel Ulbricht seemed to have ball-bearing hip joints.

And then there were the 40 children, very young School of American Ballet students coached by Garielle Whittle, in roles that include the young heroine and her prince, party guests, playthings, sweets, angels and mice. They acted exuberantly and danced impeccably.

Holiday Ritual

Many people take their kids to ``The Nutcracker'' year after year. Then they take their grandkids. This ballet is not merely holiday entertainment. It is a ritual. It assures us that -- despite our fears of menacing dreams, dark magic, the mysteries of growing up, and plain old physical threat -- all will be well. And that ecstasy is attainable, albeit fitfully.

Balanchine's ``Nutcracker'' draws upon his memories of the one he was part of as a child. In the last years of the tsars, he grew up in the illustrious academy attached to the ballet company in St. Petersburg, which numbers among its alumni Pavlova, Nijinsky and Baryshnikov.

At the age of 15, Balanchine performed the role of the young Nutcracker Prince in the Maryinsky production, having done duty earlier as a mouse and a candy cane.

Boy Prince

His own version of ``The Nutcracker'' quotes verbatim the boy prince's mime monologue, which contains a blow-by-blow description of his battle with the bellicose mice -- a tour de force of courage, vivacity and impeccable manners.

Like the incorporation of this inherited material, the whole ballet works as an homage to the old even as it revivifies the legacy for new generations. Perhaps one of the reasons we go to see it lies in its power to contradict the principles of our present throwaway culture.

Balanchine's version ignited a widespread ``Nutcracker'' craze, not least because it fills ballet companies' coffers. Today, there are so many productions nationwide, an entire Web site is devoted to cataloguing them: http://nutcrackerballet.net/index.html .

`Hard Nut'

This flood of traditional versions has sparked an anti- ``Nutcracker'' subgenre, in which Mark Morris's 1991 ``The Hard Nut'' reigns supreme. Set in a suburban Swinging Sixties, it undermines all the bourgeois premises of the original ballet, to which Balanchine lovingly adhered.

What's more, it incorporates the horrific section of the Hoffmann tale, involving an exquisite infant princess who is hideously disfigured by a vengeful mouse. Choreographers usually omit it in the interest of preserving Yuletide joy.

Nevertheless, the Morris version is tender as well as sardonic, with an ending that celebrates universal love.

© 2005 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.