Mel Johnson

I don't have the pictures of Vsevolozhsky's costumes, but I can at least throw you a link to a bunch of essays I wrote ten years ago about the whole show. Click around; most of the links are still good.

The Nutcracker essays on Ballet Alert!

Still haven't found angels, but I have located a hive of bees who appear at the apotheosis of the ballet.

I don't know if the angels are part of the libretto or not, but in it, the Prince has SISTERS! Several of 'em! They're Russian matryushka dolls, and he directs the Act II mime speech to them!

That's why I would love to see how the thing was rigged back in St. Petersburg! Original ballet scores are hard to find; original ballet stage manager prompt books seem to be nearly nonexistent! I've only seen two from productions other than those I was working with myself.

Nutcracker has always been good to stimulate discussion. During its original run, someone wrote that they were displeased by this "fragile and sugary Nutcracker". But now, it seems, this fragile thing is much like the Potomac Creek Bridge built during the American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln said of the bridge, "It is 400 feet long, and over 100 feet high, and there is nothing to it but bean poles and corn stalks, yet it carries entire loaded trains back and forth all day long!" Sometimes, the apparently delicate can have entirely startling strength.

I've never been entirely happy with the tree flying out, too, and found that in the planning of the transformation effect, Clara and the Prince were to walk INTO the tree, and it "magically" unfolded into an entire forest! I'd love to see how they rigged that effect, but then I remember about Balanchine writing about the Tsar's Finnish Regiment marching away from the Maryinsky after shows. They were the stagehands! With that much people power, no wonder they could make wondrous things happen with the scenery!

I can't say that I've ever seen that, but Robert Joffrey used to talk of soft candy (nougats) as the theme for the Trepak. Balanchine chose stick candy, which doesn't travel well, for his Danse Russe, so naturally, they have to be Candy Canes. Joffrey in his personal collection had a pair of great blousy trousers that were used by the Ballet Russe for their version of the Russian Dance.

I think it speaks quite TO the topic. After all, another feature of the Romantics was to recognize children as individuals, but again closer to the Natural Human than jaded adults. During the Enlightenment, children were often viewed as miniature adults; about 1780, they start to have their own kinds of clothes (sailor suits, Italian clown suits), where before, they had just worn miniature versions of their parents' clothing.

Yes, indeed! I have a feeling that the transformations may have employed the full arsenal of the Maryinsky's armamentarium, with sets and props flying, running, and trapping all over the stage (and watch out backstage!)

Well, she could graduate to Raymonda, as she is entirely fictional, even though Jean de Brienne and Andrew II of Hungary are real historical personages. That way, she could be almost any age, as long as she can still dance!

Remember, there are two major transformations - the part where the tree grows (Clara/Masha shrinks), and the part where the stage becomes the fir forest. With each, we get farther and farther into fantasy until we are in the realm of Fulltime Magic! The Battle with the Mice is a highly choreographed melée, and the original score even has visual cues written on it, apparently by Drigo. "Mouse picks up soldier. Turns him upside down. Eats him." I wish that section of what Ivanov staged had actually been notated, but having the cues is valuable. There was even apparently a bit of business where the Nutcracker organizes some of the toys and dolls into army surgeons and nurses. I'd purely LOVE to see what he did with that!

Petipa wrote the choreographic script for the work, and he shrewdly made the pre-transformation in the world of the mundane. Originally, he had an idea for more than just the Harlequin and Columbine dolls and the soldier or devil - depending on the version - as divertissement (there was even supposed to be a cancan - the tarantella from this section ended up as the male variation in the pas de deux) in order to provide more technical dancing, but I think he was wise to segregate the real and the magic in order to increase the latter's theatrical impact!

But remember, Act I before the transformation is set in "the real world", and the dancers dance real, if idealized versions of social dances of the mid-nineteenth century. There is much mime in Act I, intercut with dance steps. It's part of the production sensibility of the original Nutcracker, and when you stop to think, much of the Classico-Romantic repertoire. Giselle dances and mimes simultaneously, so does the Sylphide. Replacing mime with technical dancing does many works a grave disservice, in my opinion.

Springboarding from the Nutcracker threads, the practice of using adults to portray children has been discussed lightly before we went back "on track" with discussing the whole ballet.

Examples of "infantilized adults" were given as "Lise, Swanilda, Aurora and Giselle". Now, I don't know about anybody else, but these are all young women of marriageable age, and I hope that I haven't become so aged that an 18-year-old seems an infant to me. There's a difference here, I think, between the above-named parts and, say, Clara. Clara is a schoolgirl, maybe even a young teen. Judith Fugate seemed to play NYCB's Marie from the time she was about eight until she was thirteen, and is responsible for quite a number of different sizes of nightgowns being available to her successors. But the "juveniles" in ballets of the Romantic and Classical/Imperial periods are of a different sort from little children.

Part of the Romantic ethos was an ennobling of the "simple country folk", the Rousseau-like Natural People. Supposedly of less artifice and sophistication than their urban counterparts, the rurals were supposed to be of a more easily expressed humanity, and thus, from a practical standpoint, easier to portray for the stage. For examples, consider James, Effie, and Gurn. Aurora, being a royal, poses a bit of a contradiction here, but she has been kept sheltered for twenty years from Carabosse' curse, and so remains still a bit of a naïf.

Later, in ballets of the twenties, we saw in "Parade", the Little American Girl, who was not only a little girl, but had a secretarial job, could fly an airplane, shoot bad guys from horseback, drink Coca-Cola from a vending machine, and be Charlie Chaplin. But she was a creature of the Roaring Twenties and a product of the cubist/surrealist/moderne mentality, and perhaps not really a child at all, but a circus act! (Incidentally, sketches for her costume never existed. Picasso and Massine went to a department store and bought the costume off the rack in the Children's Department. It's another one of those things in the ballet that is invisible, that costume sketch.)

Later "infants", as Flindt's Student in "The Lesson" and MacMillan's child-rape victim in "The Invitation" are other kinds of depictions, of their times, and not the Classico-Romantic models.

What think?

I love the Balanchine version. I was about to write "unequivocally," except that I've never cared for the extended sequence with Marie's bed going round and round the stage. I find the rest completely magical and was able to convert one self-described ballet hater into a Balanchine lover by taking him to a performance of Mr. B's Nutcracker. When a grown man turns to you in the middle of the battle scene with a seven-year-old's look of enchantment on his face, you know that the ballet's "done it" for him.

That bed shtick is the source of a lot of controversy. I don't have as much a problem with it as I do with the SNOW that starts to fall in the parlor before the tree and the French doors fly out. Suddenly, there's a big hole in the roof?

Volcanohunter describes a situation I went through with my own father, who went to ballets and operas and plays, and knew all about "stage magic", but at the transformations in Act I, tears were rolling down his cheeks. "I've seen shows before, but this...this is SO MUCH! Better than the movies!" He even gave a startled "OH!" when the sleigh flies out at the end.

In Nuremberg?

However, remember, Stanislava Belinskaya was 12. Know who she was? The original Clara. Infantilizing adults is not a comfortable evening's watching, for me.

Petipa is usually given full credit for the libretto of Don Quixote, although I'd almost be willing to bet that he had a couple of "ghosts" and scene doctors helping, who don't get no respect! Out of that great, thick book, he took just the story of Quiteria and Basilio, and not all of it that's in the book.

I quite agree, rg, and "adoniphobia" certainly seems like an appropriate way to characterize the nastiness which was sent Culkin's way. In 1993, his family was already involved in the squabbling over management rights and parental custody, which came to Mac being declared an "emancipated minor" at age 15! All of this is publically notorious, but I cannot imagine, on my most pessimistic day, what it must have been like to have been him while all that domestic unpleasantness was happening. He indeed was much sinned against, and was a sacrifice to "star power".

A definite agreement on not using adults to portray children; it's a convention that doesn't work. If you want to portray adolescent angst, get a libretto after S.E. Hinton or Judy Blume, and leave Nutcracker alone.

Gelsey seemed to float serenely through Baryshnikov's rather sour show, but a word here to defend the much-maligned Culkin. Facially, he was radiant in the part and he was able to execute the social dances adroitly, but early adolescence was already striking, and the stretch was already taking its toll on the accuracy of his arms and hands. (He was later to recover this skill) He had studied at SAB when he was 7, but by age 12, much of what he had learned was gone! He didn't even do the walk in a circle ("pay close attention to this" in mime) at the beginning of the Act II mime speech. Balanchine wanted people to know about this detail so much, that he even included it in the first of his Stories of the Great Ballets books. That slow and majestic walk is often called "the most difficult step in all of classical ballet!" It's tough to get right, so I have sympathy for Mr. Culkin in his situation.

Although they're both rather heavily made up, I'd say that the ID is good for both of them. Eglevsky's jawline and the rather large knot at the side of his elbow were both identifiable points. (Not to mention the "unpointable foot".) Krassovska DOES look kind of like Toumanova, but her browline seems to have been extensively redrawn for this part. I took classes from both of them, much later in their lives.

Yes, indeed, patrick, my own preference spoke pretty much exclusively to Nutcracker. Other ballets may be captured somewhat successfully for the small screen, but IMO, you need to see a complete Nutz "on live". And I, too, recall McBride/Villella on Bell Telephone Hour, and Henning Kronstam and Kirsten Simone as well, dancing the pas de deux. That was, I think, my introduction to the idea that different choreography can exist to the same music - Balanchine vs. Ivanov, take your pick!

But I have noticed over the decades now since Balanchine died, that the headlong tempi to Snow and Flowers have abated somewhat, at least in the initial periods of the dances. Flowers used to rush along until the last ten notes - onetwothreefour FIIIIIIIIIVE~ sixseveneightnineten! No more. Pity! I used to like that fermata. And as to the music of the pas de deux, I still think it's the best thing that could happen to a G major scale! Isn't there a story out there that somebody bet Tchaikovsky that he couldn't make a tune out of a scale?

Me, I keep waiting for them to decide to forget the whole thing, jump into a limo, and head for the baccarat tables in Monte Carlo.

Under all circumstances, I believe it is best to go see live. Video in whatever medium is a substitute, and some substitutes are better than others. Balanchine's works best in the theater, partly because it presents a tremendous dose of magic right there before an audience's eyes within a proscenium, no "camera tricks" involved.

Whatever period a company chooses to set its Beauty in, after Aurora wakes up, it should only be a century later. The Royal had a production many called the "Plantagenet Beauty", where the first scenes looked as if they were set sometime in the late 12th century and the last act sometime in the middle 15th. They seemed to spread architecturally and costumewise over nearly 300 years, and they still didn't get out of one English dynasty. When design academics like these call attention away from the dancing, you have a ballet with troubles.

I personally prefer a 17th/18th century split. Leave the medieval for Raymonda.

And what country does it take place in? Why, Fantasyland, of course!

Balanchine's is my Gold Standard.

Both productions were derived from St.-Léon's book Stenochoreographie. The differences between the two are traceable to the difference in interpretation of the less-than-completely-intuitive notation by different notation experts. Someone else's reading might easily look quite different.