The Nutz: versions new and old arrive with the holidays plus a feast of faux pas

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2004

"When we made Nutcracker!," Bourne says, "we didn't know whether we could take on 18 dancers. We six had been character-actors, but most of us were limited in terms of sheer dance technique. Today, everybody in the company is a better dancer--the old ones included! But what matters more is the opposite: We've never lost that feeling for characterization we all had in the first place. The dancers are all motivated. There's never a moment when they're expected to move just because they've been told to. They know why their characters are doing this to that music."

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!

SKATING TO CALIFORNIA

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker! runs through Dec. 5 at Zellerbach Hall, University at California, Berkeley; Dec. 7-12 at Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa; and Dec. 15-19 at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Alastair Macaulay is the chief theater critic of The Financial Times and the chief dance critic of the Times Literary Supplement. His book of interviews, Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Motion Pictures, was published in 2000 by Faber & Faber.

Septime Webre's Capital Nutcracker

Crammed with Americana and hometown references, The Washington Ballet's new production of The Nutcracker stands out among theatrical productions this month in the nation's capital. Masterminded by artistic director Septime Webre, this version retains the Tchaikovsky score, Hoffmann's story line, and the classic Sugar Plum pas de deux. And it pays homage to the two forces that shaped the company--founder Mary Day, whose legacy is glimpsed in the party scene, and late choreographer Choo San Goh, whose Chinese dance remains partially intact. Otherwise it's Webre's show, set in Georgetown in 1882 and drenched in U.S. culture--"a magical ballet," says the production's London-based set designer Peter Horne, "that will surprise and thrill the audience."

Official Washington is on board. The District of Columbia will be appropriating several hundred thousand dollars, and collaborators include the National Building Museum and the Smithsonian Associates.

But Webre acknowledges that he has big shoes to fill. The $1 million extravaganza continues a tradition begun in 1961 when Mary Day first staged the holiday favorite. Her Nutcracker introduced generations of Washingtonians to ballet and showcased some of the nation's most promising talent--the young Kevin McKenzie (now artistic director of ABT) as a Candy Cane, for example, and Marianna Tcherkassky in the Star solo choreographed for the budding ballerina (now ballet mistress at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre). Conventional perhaps, but polished and utterly charming, the production withstood stiff competition, season after season. "I would be more than happy to continue to produce that Nutcracker," Webre maintains, "but Mary Day retired this year and she wanted it to retire with her."

Webre's concept has undoubtedly benefited from his undergraduate degree in history. Act I opens with an act of kindness toward a Civil War veteran outside a mansion filled with paintings and gifts that reflect the era's fascination with the Far West and the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass, the intellectual voice of the 19th-century African American community, appears among the contemporaries invited to the party; Humpty Dumpty--a nursery rhyme character, Webre points out, originally intended to spoof George III--is wheeled into the ballroom, cracks open, and out spills John Paul Jones, the American naval hero of the Revolutionary War. The Rat King resembles the British monarch; the rats, his Redcoats; the toy soldiers, the Continental Army; and the Nutcracker, a young George Washington.