The Nutcracker
Music by Peter Tchaikovsky. Choreographed by Daniel Pelzig, Bruce Marks, Sydney Leonard, Anna-Marie Holmes, and Gianni Di Marco. Set by Helen Pond and Herbert Senn. Costumes by David Walker. With the Boston Ballet Orchestra conducted by Jonathan McPhee and Mark Churchill. Presented by Boston Ballet at the Wang Theatre through December 30.

Five choreographers get credit for Boston Ballet’s current Nutcracker, and every year things get added to the perennial Christmas ballet. The idea seems to be that old tired ideas need constant spiffing up, as long as the bones of the piece don’t disappear entirely. This Nutcracker is a collection of sketches and numbers, a kind of vaudeville, more like Saturday Night Live than a cherished bedtime story.

In addition to the usual characters and traditional effects, there are attractions like an acrobatic dancing bear and a gingerbread man. The story of Clara (Olivia Hartzell in the cast I saw) and her mysterious godfather Drosselmeyer (Patrick Thornberry) is often upstaged by a Grandfather (Gianni Di Marco) who has regressed to about age seven and a Delivery Boy (Yosuke Mino) who acts like one of the family. The battle of the mice and the toy soldiers can be a comic affair, but these rodents seem more interested in carousing than in advancing the plot.

Act one is quite fast-paced, dithery even, what with Grandpa trying to steal Fritz’s toys and Grandma looking distracted and Drosselmeyer producing illusions, a toy theater, and a cake out of a hat, for hordes of agitated kids. When the tree has grown and the unruly mice have been dispatched and the nutcracker has turned into a boy prince, the ballet gets down to ballet business. Although more organized, the stage still looks overstuffed. The snowflakes don’t swirl and leap under the giant trees; they line up for a conventional pas d’action, led last Thursday night by Pollyana Ribeiro and Hervé Courtain as the Snow Queen and King.

There’s plenty of classical dancing from then on, including references to other ballets. Four men have been inserted into the Waltz of the Flowers, solely, it seems, to partner Dew Drop (Karla Kovatch), in a nod to the Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty. The divertissements, which take place in a life-size dream version of Drosselmeyer’s toy theater, all seem to have extra bits to them — perhaps on the theory that by now we’ll be bored with looking at dances. The Marzipan Shepherdess (Alexandra Kochis) has a partner, and her attendants lead on adorable woolly lambs played of course by children.

The only time I thought the ballet slowed down enough to enjoy itself was during the dances of Sugar Plum and her Cavalier (Adriana Suárez and Paul Thrussell). Suárez doesn’t do everything the same way; she varies her tempo, shows you that some changes can flow smoothly together and some can have stopped poses between. She can unfold slowly into a gesture or snap into a new focus. Thrussell partnered her beautifully, not just attentive but admiring. I also liked Jennifer Gelfand’s Dionysian Spanish dance and the almost erotic way Robert Underwood and Michael Johnson handled Brooke Kiser in Coffee.

But the rest of the production delivered more than I needed. The new Mother Ginger divertissement features so much mugging by the lady with the capacious costume that you barely notice the dance of the children who’ve been hiding under her skirts. Aside from the legitimate foreshadowings of the narrative act to the dream, there are two of too many things: two characters in drag (Grandma and Mother Ginger), two getaway vehicles (a sleigh and a balloon), and a tableau in front of the curtain during the overture, where characters resembling the people we’re about to see enact a street scene.

The Nutcracker’s story line may differ slightly from one production to another, but its underlying themes are the stuff of fairy tale. It’s a journey out of childhood, starting in the safety of home. Clara’s scary intimations of adolescent sexuality are suppressed by her godfather. With a magician’s powers, Drosselmeyer reassures Clara by conjuring up the transformations, supernatural events, and extravagant pleasures of the Enchanted Forest and the Palace of Sweets, all of them described in Tchaikovsky’s wonderful music.

We needn’t go into the Freudian implications of this though some productions have. Here Clara is tossed back and forth, on the brink of awareness, between Drosselmeyer and the Nutcracker prince come to life. They represent the protector and the dolls of her childish life, as well as potential romantic sexual partners. The post-party events may be Drosselmeyer’s creation, or just Clara’s overstimulated dreams. Boston Ballet doesn’t show us where — or if — Clara returns to Earth.

The company’s new director, Mikko Nissinen, made a charming gesture by dedicating the evening’s Nutcracker to Willam Christensen, the founder of the San Francisco Ballet, who died in October. Christensen directed the first full-length American Nutcracker, and Nissinen’s tribute speaks of a rare and welcome connectedness to ballet’s history.

Issue Date: December 6-13, 2001

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