Visions of Sugar Plums

<First published online in the New York Times on December 21, 2007>

On Wednesday evening at the New York State Theater, George Balanchine’s production of “The Nutcracker” achieved its 2,000th performance by New York City Ballet. After a perfectly straightforward account of the first act, the second one became a special event. The three principal dance roles - the Sugar Plum Fairy, her Cavalier and the Dewdrop Fairy - were performed in multiple castings. One Sugar Plum ballerina (Maria Kowroski) danced the character’s solo; later another (Wendy Whelan) danced her adagio; then three (Darci Kistler, Yvonne Borree and Abi Stafford) shared the stage in its coda, of whom one (Ms. Kistler, who was dancing lead “Nutcracker” roles in her 1980 debut season) took charge of the end of the ballet.

This 6 p.m. performance (the company had already danced a matinee at 2) was a festive occasion, with dancers and audience joined in affection for a classic local institution. The Balanchine “Nutcracker,” which had its premiere at New York City Center on Feb. 2, 1954, is now older than any member of its onstage cast (except an occasional Drosselmeier) and most of the audience.

I’m actually surprised, having not tried to do the math, that this performance was only the 2,000th. Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap” has clocked up almost 23,000 performances in its nonstop London West End run since 1952. But to those of us who have watched good stagings of plays, ballets and operas crumble after only a very few performances (and who know how stale “The Mousetrap” was looking years ago), the evergreen freshness of the Balanchine “Nutcracker” is cause for wonder. Watching it with several different casts this season as well as on Wednesday, I regret that I have seen only 1 percent of its performances to date, the more so as I still find new felicities of drama and construction at each viewing.

Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” contains many layers of history. The Candy Cane dance in Act II was his memory of the dance he himself had performed in 1922 in Petrograd, Russia (the former and present St. Petersburg), and it corresponds not only to descriptions of this dance at the ballet’s 1892 premiere but also to the choreographer Marius Petipa’s original 1891 plan for the ballet, in which this dance was to be “avec cerceaux” (with hoops). Many other moments also fulfill Petipa’s original plan, and it’s fair to wonder whether the first Russian production ever fitted some things to the music as judiciously as Balanchine’s.

This isn’t the world’s only current production, for instance, to have the Christmas tree grow to outsize proportions to Tchaikovsky’s designated music, but it is a particular thrill to notice the precise moment when Balanchine’s tree starts to rise. Amid all the other stage business that has to be presented at that point in the ballet, he waits till the rising scales in the music are taken up by the brass: the change of sonority becomes the cue for action. (I love too that the tree doesn’t stop growing until its top is actually out of sight.)

But Balanchine felt free to ignore the original “Nutcracker” plan when he chose. The wonderful first scene, when the children peep through the keyhole to see their parents decorating the tree, is all his own. So are many later moments, like when old Drosselmeier introduces the little heroine to his nephew. (Their slow-motion handshake is one of the ballet’s first fleeting intimations that time itself can be changed.) The original Waltz of the Flowers had no major solo role: Balanchine’s Dewdrop is his own invention.

It is like Balanchine too that he took a singular virtuoso step particularly associated with the original Sugar Plum Fairy solo - the gargouillade, a jump in which both feet write rings in the air - and gave it to a different character, the soloist leading the Marzipan Shepherdesses or Mirlitons. To the Sugar Plum herself, he gives no one step that might single her out. Her idyllic supremacy in the Kingdom of Sweets is established by the serene architecture with which her steps and phrases take us from one grand beauty to another; I love especially the two arching lifts across the stage, this way and then that, in her partner’s arms, in which she has world enough and time while the music keeps building beneath her.

It honestly doesn’t matter that none of Wednesday’s dancers were on their best form, though Ashley Bouder, dancing Dewdrop in three sections of the Waltz of the Flowers, certainly burned up the stage. The arrangement of the plural casts was ingenious, especially when two Cavaliers doing one phrase flanked a third doing another. Costumes are looking bright, lighting helpful, every performance well focused.

What keeps this “Nutcracker” so young is, of course, its onstage children. The story begins with Fritz and Marie; from Fritz’s restless but engaging bad behavior (he pushes Marie off her chair in the very first scene, long before he breaks her Nutcracker doll), and from the ways his parents and Drosselmeier deal with him, we learn lessons about human impulse and the value of good manners that open up the whole ballet’s inner world.

Another bond in this “Nutcracker” is that so many of its dancers learn one of its roles after another. At Saturday’s matinee, I loved the teenage Kathryn Morgan’s debut as Sugar Plum. She is gaining in lower-body strength and precision while retaining the upper-body creamy fluidity and dramatic focus that make her unusual. But at the next day’s matinee, she was back to playing Marie’s grandmother in the Christmas party scene (as she was on Wednesday evening) and then returned as the first Snowflake. Though I haven’t yet seen her dance Marzipan, I’ve arranged to see it after Christmas.

And so the changeover of roles goes on from one “Nutcracker” to another. Every performance is attended by ballet mothers who know more about it than anyone else in the audience. When the bed travels magically around the stage, they know there is a little boy underneath.

My favorite piece of insider knowledge was uttered years ago by one such mother to another. Watching a young man making his debut as the Sugar Plum’s Cavalier, she whispered, “I remember him when he was the bed.”

@New York Times, 2007