Cracking on...

It's that time of year in ballet land when no matter whether you're in the big leagues or at the proverbial Dolly Dinkle School, there's a purple-pink shimmer, candy-cane scented, wafting through the air. Nutcracker Season is upon us!

If you haven't already read the excellent Nutcracker Nation by Jennifer Fisher, I urge you to find a copy right now! It's such a great, and loving, exploration of the whole Nutcracker phenomenon, especially in North America, and especially in relation to our multicultural landscape. Essentially, Fisher demonstrates that the popularity of The Nutcracker Ballet in North America has a very distinct cultural and economic history rooted in the rise of television and the development of suburban leisure values in post-WWII US and Canadian culture. And as anyone doing the books for a ballet-based school or company in North America knows, it's the moneymaker and the parent-pleaser that you almost cannot do without.

But there is not just one Nutcracker, there are instead Nutcrackers, one of the things Fisher explores towards the end of her book. The variability, the mutability, and the adaptability of this phenomenon to all sorts of audiences and communities is really fundamental to its lasting appeal. This is so perfectly illustrated in the documentary Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, which chronicles the 2019 production of Debbie Allen's studio's amped up, multi-genre tribute to the classic. It's a great film (Shondaland, natch!), but it also really explores how this weird German Romantic story filtered through French and Russian lenses and then commercialized in the twentieth century can be transformed to mean something to a group of Black and Brown kids from some pretty impoverished backgrounds who have been offered the opportunity, by Allen and her amazing team, to become artists. I got a little misty.

I've seen a lot of Nutcrackers in my day; it was an annual ritual when I was a kid in Seattle, and sometimes we'd even go to two in one season -- the PNB production and a visiting company. Then I saw it in Boston at one point, and I'm pretty sure I saw the SF Ballet production a couple of times. Unlike other ballets where I'm always tempted to say, "Oh, this version is the best," I don't feel that way at all about the Nutcracker. It's really the case that each version has its own logic, its own raison d'etre.

Well, MOST versions. I feel a lot less openhearted about some of the film versions. As a young mom, I was subjected to frequent replays of the Barbie version. It's... odd and awkward, sort of like the doll herself. And then, I was not a huge fan of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which was weird in a way that seemed appropriate to the source material, but also weirdly boring (too much CGI?). I'm not counting filmed versions of stage productions, or even the Baryshnikov/Kirkland film from 1977. Those are not film versions of the story, just filmed ballets, if you know what I mean?

Although I was a baby bunhead, and took ballet pretty seriously from age 9 to 16, I actually was never in a Nutcracker production as a kid. My friends who went to PNB would get to be party children, or mice, or soldiers, but I never even went to an audition. I think my parents felt like it would be a hassle, and they were not wrong. One year, a girl in my class at Cornish was chosen as one of the Claras, and we were all so insanely jealous, until she told us that it was basically a lot of sitting around -- in the PNB production at the time, Clara and the Nutcracker Prince spent the entirety of Act II sitting on a throne. Still, I would have loved to be a mouse or a soldier... Instead, I got to be a villager, or once the old woman, in our school's production of the Snow Princess. Thanks, Nellie Cornish.

My eldest child loved ballet for a while (and still talks about wanting to go back to it, but that's another essay altogether), and really, really wanted to be in the civic ballet's production. Sadly, the only part they ever got was "Sleigh Page" -- basically, stagehand in an angel costume pushing the sleigh with Clara and the Nutcracker Prince on and off stage. Not exactly anyone's idea of a star turn. However, since my kid was in the show, I did makeup and helped out backstage, which was fun, but madness, given a cast of mostly kids under the age of 15.

In fact, being a mouse is still an ambition of mine. I would really love to play the Mouse King! First of all, there's the anonymity of wearing a giant mouse head, and second, it's such a campy, feisty part. I hope that someday my turn will come. I've been practicing my whisker cleaning and my lying-on-my-back-and-dramatically-dying moves.

Just once, I have been on stage for a Nutcracker, as a party parent (specifically, as "Party Mom #1"), and it was soooooo fun. I've also enjoyed being backstage and helping the kids with their costumes and makeup. It's just a treat to be part of the ritual, I suppose. And who doesn't love the Snow Scene, watched from the wings, while the local children's choir "Ah ah ah ah ahhhhs" from the balcony?

Anyhow, whatever your Nutcracker plans for this winter, may they prosper (and be free of weird, gross, culturally inappropriate stereotypes).