A Facebook post from Laura: "At the SF Ballet tonight, the smoke machines caused the fire alarms to go off during the dream scene of The Nutcracker. Milling about outside with the horse ballet dancers, cellist, and trombone player was a bit like seeing the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz."
Paul: "It was weird seeing the strobe-lights flashing on the proscenium as the Christmas tree lights started rising, as the tree started to grow. I thought, 'They've added some new effects this year,' but then the voiceover telling us to go to the exits kicked in, and there was nothing magical about it. In fact, the loudspeakers echoed against each other so bad you could not make out what they were saying. But the audience figured it out, with no panic."
Folks, this happened in real time. And it broke the back of the dramatic development of the story. But �" and this is crucial �" the dramatic time and the dance time of The Nutcracker are separate entities, though they are integrated so they happen simultaneously �" and over and over again, the dancers saved the day, and gave us a performance we could all go home and feel glad we'd been there to see happen.
Space limitations forbid telling the story of how Nutcracker conquered America, but the first major production was here at SFB in the 1930s, mounted by Willam Christensen, based on what George Balanchine, who was then working for Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood, told him of the show he first danced in as a child in St. Petersburg.
Ballet was transplanted to these shores less than 100 years ago by refugees fleeing the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. Unlike opera, which was hugely popular in the Americas �" in New York, New Orleans, Havana, Mexico City, and San Francisco �" well before the Civil War, ballet got here late. It got its first serious plantation in SF under Gaetano Merola, who made ballet-training part of his work at the SF Opera House.
When the great teachers arrived, American teenage girls took to it like ugly ducklings, since nothing fascinates teenage girls more than the ability to control their bodies when their hormones are going berserk. Almost immediately, the US was turning out astonishing technicians, stronger, with better feet and more spectacular turns than the world had ever seen.
That is still so. If you go to one of the recital neighborhood Nutcrackers (and you should! They abound in Marin, Oakland, Berkeley, up and down the Peninsula), you can see some amazing individual performances �" wonderful sugar-plum fairies, wonderful solos of every spice. What you can not see in any of these smaller productions is the big production numbers like Snow, which forms the first-act finale and requires full-scale opera-house values: live orchestra, a complete blizzard of snowflakes, and a large corps de ballet trained to dance amidst a whirlwind of white confetti. They whirl and dart and trace precise trajectories amidst blinding white lights and a welter of coin-sized bits of paper falling from the flies; the level of actual danger in this dance is very high. They converge on the center, doing sharp turns heading towards each other. For the audience, the adrenaline spike is huge �" especially since vast numbers of the audience are themselves dancers, who have come to see the SFB dancers, among the finest in the world, and they know just how scary this is. But non-dancers feel the excitement, without realizing in full detail how dangerous it was.
Photo: Erik Tomasson
What's great about San Francisco Ballet's performance is the sang froid of the corps de ballet dancers like Jordan Hammond, Kristina Lind, Shannon Rugani, Koto Ishihara, Kimberley Braylock, Nicole Ciapponi, dancers who would be stars in any other company, whose arrowy footwork and soft, fascinating arms make them the glories of this company. They make it possible for there to be dances for the corps de ballet that require virtuosity of the first rank from every member of the company such as you can't find anywhere else except in the world's greatest ballet companies.
And we have not even mentioned the boys. Good as the girls are, this is a men's company. SFB director has assembled the finest cadre of male dancers you can imagine. So you only see them in the small ensembles �" Steven Morse in the Arabian absolutely blew my mind. It's a pas de trois, and ostensibly it's a "genie from the lamp" dance, with a hootchie-kootchie dance for a girl in harem pants, extremely well-danced by Jennifer Stahl �" but she was only at her best when partnered by Morse, whose every move was like the smoke from a marijuana cigarette �" inspired, dangerous. He was the god of the dance last Friday night.
On the other hand he was out-danced by Francisco Mungamba, who tore it up in the Russian dance; these are the guys who jump out of the Faberge eggs and do a Troika of folk steps with crazy split jumps and gazillions of turns to Tchaikovsky's maddest music, in choreography held over from the good old days, by the venerable Anatole Vilzak, who left Russia with Balanchine and Danilova 100 years ago in the first great emigration, and settled here in the 1950s.
Photo: Erik Tomasson
The old stuff is the best. Although Nutcracker is a cash cow, and it brings in the money the company needs to put on the experimental ballets yet to be performed in the real ballet season, it is a big mistake to treat Nutcracker ish fairy tales cynically. Au contraire , over the last 30 years, the culture has tilted towards fantasy, towards Dungeons and Dragons, towards magic, towards Harry Potter, Twilight, The Lord of the Rings. Our Nutcracker has problems in its attitude towards fantasy �" the first act is weak; the second, more traditional act is stronger �" and it's wonderful to see the Sugar Plum Fairy danced with complete aplomb by our new French ballerina, Mathilde Froustey. Nothing in her performance became her so well as the crowning moment when she placed the tiara on the head of our little-girl heroine Clara (Charlotte Ogden Moore), who's about to step into a magic chamber and emerge as the ballerina Yuan Yuan Tan, the grown-up version of herself. Without Froustey's charisma, which has the power to confer "you are one of us" status on the child star, there'd be no continuity between the kid and the diva, but it worked. The kid became the international-star dancer, who stepped out of that chamber and continued to dance the most exacting and beautiful steps of the ballet, and put it over the top.
Major assists along the way were given by Davit Karapetyan, the nutcracker Prince, who danced nobly and with impeccable technique and style. Also outstanding were James Sofranko as the lead Russian dancer, Jordan Hammond (housekeeper), Katita Waldo (mama), Kimberley Braylock (aunt), and Alexander Reneff-Olson (uncle) in the party scene; Mingxuan Wang (rag doll) in the party scene; and Dores Andre and Hansuke Yamamoto as King and Queen of the Snow.
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