San Francisco Ballet's Nutcracker, which opened with brilliant dancing, gorgeous music and spectacular staging last week and runs through Dec. 27, should be a source of civic pride to us all. It is the longest-running complete version in this country of a ballet that is now produced in every town across the land with a ballet school and at least six girls on pointe. There will be major versions in Oakland and San Jose, and school recitals and alternative versions galore during the coming weeks.
Like all ballet companies in the English-speaking world, SF Ballet is the result of the Diaspora of Russian dancers who had to flee the Revolution, bringing their training, values, music, and ballets they knew from of old, such as Nutcracker, which the Russian community here in San Francisco urged the new SFB director, Willam Christensen, to put on the Opera House stage. They backed it financially. That production, in 1944, was based on reports told to Christensen by George Balanchine, who had danced in the original. (Balanchine had yet to land on his feet, and was working in Hollywood. He went on to found the New York City Ballet and choreograph his own great version in the 1950s.)
Nutcracker's success looked likely in 1944. The music was already extremely well-known; the recording in 1909 of the Nutcracker Suite is perhaps the first record album ever made; recordings were hugely popular during the Depression; and Disney's animated Nutcracker Suite helped make the fortunes of Fantasia (the movie) in 1941. (Mark Morris, who'd later choreograph his own alternative Nutcracker, proclaims the Fantasia choreography "the best Nutcracker ever.")
The Nutcracker Suite is just extracts of the most fantastic parts. But the whole Nutcracker is a nostalgic story of a middle-class girl, Clara, whose brother fights with her throughout their Christmas party. It moves seamlessly from the real world, seen through a child's eyes, into Wonderland. We see all the cousins, aunts and uncles in their best clothes, lots of dancing, Uncle Drosselmeyer's magic tricks; how she falls asleep, dreams she's shrunk to the size of a mouse, has to fight off an army of vermin with the help of the Nutcracker her uncle gave her, how she summons her courage and attacks the Mouse King so the Nutcracker can run him through, and, having conquered her fears, sails off through the snow into the world of Konfiturenburg, where all the desserts of the world dance for her in a celebration of international peace and harmony. And then, of course, she goes back home.
A small-town recital can be a delightful thing, if you know all the children involved; since it's about a little girl, a lot of skill is not required. But a big-city, opera-house production, with big-time stage-magic, snow falling from the skies, a tree that grows to giant size, a live orchestra in the pit, apparitions materializing through trap doors, the kinds of illusions that lighting, costumes, scrims, stage fog and, most of all, big-time ballet technique can create: these can make a sweet story into something visionary, grade-A fancy, and haunting. A Sugar-Plum Fairy who darts about on tip-toe, almost swimming in the air, who seems fairy-like – well, that is something to see. A ballerina in full flight can create effects that make computer animation seem flat by comparison.
The best thing about this year's production, which I saw on Saturday night, is the young dancer playing Clara, Elena Harutyunyan, who was so thoroughly in the moment, alive to the music and the other characters around her, her performance cast a glow on everything else. That, and the house she lives in and comes home to. The furniture dances in this production; during the battle with the Mouse King, the china closet lets down a drawbridge, and tin soldiers fighting on Clara's side come marching out.
There are many other wonderful effects. Unfortunately, our current Nutcracker (the production was new in 2004) only rates two cheers, not three. The production suffers from several story-telling flaws that cause it to pull its punches and sometimes fail to touch our hearts when it's very important.
The party scene lacks distinction. It's a pleasant blur of people milling about, but cues in the music get missed that seem to call for very specific events: big deals like the entrance of newly arriving guests, piquant small details like the opening of an ugly present. The party should get overheated and go on too long; this feels over too soon. There is a lovely sequence for the grandparents, and a touching dance for the father and daughter, but these touches do not make a big family party.
The visionary act is iffy. The Sugar-Plum Fairy's music is now given to a ballerina who's supposed to be a magical transformation of Clara, but the transformation is badly prepared: if we don't believe it (depending on the casting, it's sometimes too abrupt), the climax can be a tinny display of technique. Sugar-Plum, meanwhile, has had to invade the "Waltz of the Flowers" to have a chance to dance at all, but there's nothing appropriate for her to be doing to that music, since it's grand and rich with massed French horns, thick with orchestral colors – not appropriate for a soloist – which leaves the Flowers with little to do at their biggest moments.
On the other hand, the framing of the story is excellent: the mother-child reunion at the very end, when Clara wakens from her dream, is the strongest final scene of any Nutcracker anywhere.
Gold stars go to the following dancers: Luke Willis as Clara's father; Jim Sohm as her grandfather; Yuri Posskohov as her uncle Drosselmeyer. Shannon Roberts, as a Spanish dancer; Isaac Hernandez, Diego Cruz, and Daniel Baker as the three Russians who burst out of Faberge eggs, then spin their heads off in the Russian Trepak, with extra credit for honoring so splendidly the memory of Anatole Vilzak, the great Russian emigre dancer/teacher who choreographed that number; Clara Blanco as a Housemaid and a Snowflake; and Sofiane Sylve, who danced heroically in the adagio of the Grand Pas de Deux.
A silver star goes to the new SFB dancer Artem Yachmennikov, who faded as the evening went on, but had danced with winning presence, gallantry, and style as the Nutcracker prince.