If anyone needs proof that arts education in childhood delivers an audience for the arts in adulthood, consider the smash hit of the season, “The Nutcracker.”
“Mommy, I want to do that!” a little girl from Beachland Elementary pleaded after seeing Riverside Children’s Theatre’s “The Nutcracker: In Swingtime!”
And so it goes, around the country: Children in Nutcracker audiences become performers; they grow up and bring their own children. From the Kravis Center to Lincoln Center, those who may have seen the ballet in the 1950s escort their great-grandchildren today, aflutter in their matinee finery.
Friday, tiny school kids in pink parkas and flopping hoodies snaked along the sidewalk from to Riverside Children’s Theatre back to their classrooms at Beachland, holding hands at the crosswalk, yammering happily. For cars stopped in holiday traffic, it was the best Christmas display the city could possibly provide.
If you’ve been watching Ovation TV’s “Battle of the Nutcrackers” this week, airing at the insane hour of 7 a.m., you might agree the channel’s doing a good job of classing up TV in general. Good on you, too: You’ve seen two U.S. premieres and two versions from rival Russian companies while the rest of us were still booting up the coffee brewer.
Fortunately, there are still warriors in the live “Nutcracker” battle being waged within driving distance of Vero, including the same version from the Bolshoi Ballet that Ovation aired Wednesday. The granddaddy of all productions, the Bolshoi’s “Nutcracker” can be seen at Vero’s Majestic Theatre Sunday, simulcast live from Russia. The three-hour production starts at 12:55 p.m. Tickets are $20.
And next Saturday, Dec. 27, through Tuesday, Dec. 30, the Miami City Ballet performs its “Nutcracker” at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. That company is one of only a few in the world licensed to do the version of the great choreographer George Balanchine. Tickets start at $25, and go up to $79. Call 1-800-KRAVIS-1 or go to www.kravis.org.
Also next week, the State Ballet Theatre of Russia performs the Bolshoi’s version of “The Nutcracker” at the Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce, on Dec. 26 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $55, $45 and $20 for children 12 and under. Call 772-461-4775 or go to www.sunrisetheatre.com.
The nearly 200-year-old German tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann was softened up by the French writer Alexandre Dumas, and then turned into a ballet by a group of Russians and set to Tchaikovsky’s score, written 122 years ago.
“The Nutcracker” has been a Christmas tradition in America for 70 years, since its first staging in this country by the San Francisco Ballet.
Since then, the story and the ballet have been reworked countless times including the late children’s author Maurice Sendak, whose “Where the Wild Things Are”-style sets and libretto returned some of the “bite and muscle” of the original, darker Hoffman story, as Sendak told NPR of his 1983 creation for Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. The acclaimed company has staged the version every year since. But this year’s Sendak “Nutcracker” will be Pacific Northwest’s last; in 2015, it will stage Balanchine’s 1954 version, with the lead roles of Marie (or Clara) and her Nutcracker danced by children, with far simpler steps, and barely a hint of romance between them.
Here at Riverside, dance director Adam Schnell chose to shake up Vero’s offerings of various ballet school versions (Vero Classical Ballet and Space Coast Ballet, which adds paid professional dancers from major companies) and professional touring Nutcrackers (at Fort Pierce’s Sunrise Theatre, and of course, Kravis.)
Schnell set about staging a pre-war version set to the big band score written in 1960 by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
With 65 kids wanting to participate and only a dozen or so in advanced classes, Schnell nevertheless knew he needed a show good enough to draw more than just family and friends of the cast.
So he made the dancing more jazz-inflected – a little Charleston, a little Jitterbug. A lot accessible to beginning dancers.
More impressively, Schnell himself made up the narrative, a wonderfully weaving, well-paced tale simple enough to be told through balletic pantomime, and involved enough to allow for the action needed to keep the kids (more or less) engaged. The staging was clever – particularly the scene Balanchine stages with Clara on a bed, in which Schnell has Clara shrink and the furniture grow enormous.
“The Nutcracker: In Swing Time” is set in 1938, and his Clara, danced by his longtime student Kendra Osborn, is afraid she’s been abandoned at boarding school after hearing her parents have taken off on a cruise. With a few numbers involving “Annie”- like orphanage awfulness in the boarding school, Clara ends up alone in her bunk bed as the rest are shooed out for Christmas break with their families. Only her wooden Nutcracker doll keeps her company. As she dozes, a much younger version of herself comes on stage, then a bigger one, and finally she is left to find her parents herself with the help of a swing-era cool fairy – she and a wicked jazzy Mouse Queen were the only dancers in tutu – and a wonderful cast of fabulously costumed characters.
This year’s run of “The Nutcracker: In Swing Time!” has ended; 65 families can go back to being families, and not just stars and chauffeurs.
Vero’s home-grown Nutcracker will be back for its fifth run next year; auditions are in late summer (tell Siri now). That means dozens of new dancers can thrill to being part of a great Christmas tradition, and even better, the grand illusion of the stage.
Witness 3-year-old Hope Shine, seated in the audience in the lap of her mother, Melissa, as her big sister Lola, 6, took to the stage for the first time, as a rag doll.
It was fully five minutes into the performance when Hope tentatively asked her mother, “Are they real?”
“Yes,” Melissa answered.
Saturday, another centuries-old tradition has its Vero incarnation when Handel’s “Messiah” is performed at First Baptist Church. The free 7 p.m. performance, directed by Michael Carter, features professional soloists and orchestra, plus a number of community choruses including the Treasure Coast Chorale.
And Saturday, Sunday and Monday evenings, McKee Botanical Gardens will try to best the natural splendor by gussying up the paths and plants with Christmas lights and decorations, and tweaking the crepuscular chorus of frogs and crickets with holiday music from a restored 1924 Wurlitzer band organ. And for the kids who are growing up with the McKee model train, it’ll make its 10th annual appearance, only bigger and better, as expected. The train, which now runs on 200 feet of track on three levels, will now chug along to mooing, piped in through speakers from miniature pastures outside the model village. Peter Tyson, who insures aircraft and yachts for a living, and Eric Menger, the city’s airport director, put the train together in what amounts to a month’s worth of man-hours. They will serve as “conductors” this weekend.
Regular park admission fees apply: $12 for adults, $11 for seniors, and $8 for children. Kids under 3 are free. On the days of the Christmas festival, the park will close at 5 p.m. as usual, and re-open for the festival from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.