When Samuel Black was a little tap-dancer growing up in the East Bay, he saw The Hard Nut in Berkeley and dreamed of growing up to be in Mark Morris' company and dancing in the show. He's made it — this year, he debuts in it at Zellerbach Hall on Dec. 14. Now, how gay is that? Even if he's not queer — it's not polite to ask — I think that makes him one of us.
The Hard Nut is now 16 years old, and looks like a real classic — not just an alternative Nutcracker, a holiday show for misfits (though it is certainly that, a festive, subversive way to kill holiday depression). It's classic "low burlesque," the satirical form that makes a close parody of a "high" work of art, translating it several scales down the social ladder, but thereby refreshing the values enshrined in the original.
So Morris has taken the Victorian family circle and travestied it, but kept alive the hopes of the Romantics. The Hard Nut enshrines real family values by bringing back the old virtues in such a riotous new way that you don't even recognize them until, in the grand, massive dances at the end, you realize that this show is romantic, that it's about life-long bonding, about love, devotion, commitment, finding that one person and giving them everything you have, in front of God and everybody, now and forever.
Morris has made The Hard Nut as nutty as a fruitcake. The show takes its look from the "psychopathology-of-everyday-life" cartoons of Charles Burns (Dog Boy, Big Baby). The Christmas party is a 70s-style, post-hippies, drugs-and-alcohol bash with kids; the friends get drunk and maudlin, and the kids are bratty. This makes Marie really rather a lot like Cinderella, the only reasonable and lovely person in a vulgar comic world, aside from fairy-godfather Drosselmeyer (Rob Besserer, who is, like the character he plays, the coolest thing that ever was). Morris himself is a party guest who disappears at one point, and returns trailing a length of toilet-paper from his shoe. His dancers are fabulous at all this. Most of the originators of the parts have begun to drop out, but Kraig Patterson still plays the maid, in a little French apron and black pointe shoes.
Sticking to the same general outlines as Balanchine, and since Morris is as devoted to the music as Balanchine, he pretty much has to follow its libretto and gives us a big Christmas party, a phantasmagoric post-party dream-nightmare conflict, and perhaps the greatest snow-scene of them all. The whole is so inventive, the jokes come so fast, the matching of American pop dancing (the bump, the hokey-pokey, Soul Train antics) to the Victorian party-dance rhythms of the score is so shrewd and apt, and the Doonesbury -ish social observations so adroit, the audience doesn't know what hits them, and many are still laughing at passages where what's in fact happening is radiant, soaring, sublime.
Morris' strategy is like what the Trockaderos used with their Swan Lake: front-load the jokes, then gradually transform the parody into a) neutral classicism, then b) break hearts, all joking aside, with sincere, emotional Romantic style. It's not as simple as that, for it comes in waves rather than as a steady change. Nothing in the wild-and-crazy party scene is as gut-bustingly funny as the Merry-Melody Waltz of the Vegetable Kingdom, where the dancers virtually wallow in the rich juices of all those French horn chords. But as the music of the grand pas begins, the tone of the dancing changes into something quite exalted — the lovers acknowledge each other in the grandest, clearest gestural language. "She's my girl," he says, lifting his arm and saluting her as a pair of dancers raise her up and wheel her through the skies, and she reciprocates, the same gesture, the same helicoptering lift.
It keeps getting more romantic. Both of them dance to the celesta music (i.e., the Sugar-Plum Fairy's solo), and where the music imitates the "warning-sound" of French chiming clocks, he kisses her on the hand; she dances away, shudders, comes back for more; he kisses the other hand, and kisses and kisses her. The dance ends with them spinning and spinning, joined in an unending kiss. Not even Romeo and Juliet makes so much out of a kiss.
A pas de deux takes its character from its imagery and from the quality of the support the dancers give each other. The adagio is also a repeat, almost verbatim, of a pas de deux Drosselmeyer danced with the Young Drosselmeyer/Nutcracker character in Marie's first-act dream (to the Snow Transformation music). Morris announces his motifs like Beethoven, and the uses he makes of them knit the fabric together at a profound level, which makes me feel it's built to last. It is so solidly made that every time you see it, new insights emerge, new epiphanies arise. What it will be this time, I don't know yet. But I wouldn't miss it.
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