'Tis the Nutcracker Season

"It's a fairy tale, it's magic, it's entertainment," says Choreographer George Balanchine. "It's like beautiful flowers: they don't tell you anything, but they make you feel good." Balanchine is talking about the ballet known in Germany as Der Nussknacker, in France as Casse-Noisette and throughout the English-speaking world as The Nutcracker. Not even Walt Disney could top it. Right on stage a Christmas tree grows magically to an enormous height. A nutcracker doll springs to life, defends its young mistress, Marie, against an army of huge mice, then turns into a young prince. A white bed, moving under its own power, transports Marie through a wintry forest and into the Land of Sweets. There she and the prince are entertained by the Sugar Plum Fairy before they fly off in a reindeer-drawn coach to eternal happiness.

Box-Office Bonanza. Prior to the 1892 premiere at the Maryinsky Theater in old St. Petersburg, Russia, Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky thought that Nutcracker was much inferior to his The Sleeping Beauty. "Yes, the old fellow is getting worn out," he concluded. Tchaikovsky was one of music's great pessimists. The score is an indestructible delight. Over the years Nutcracker has probably played to more children, parents and lovers of both dance and make-believe than any other ballet in history.

Today, for the dance companies of the U.S. and Europe, Nutcracker is invariably a boxoffice bonanza. "It's what pays the bills for every company," said Deborah Morris of the Theater Ballet of San Francisco. For audiences it provides escape into a world of genuine magic. After her fourth Nutcracker at a

Boston Ballet performance led by Arthur Fiedler, 82, Linda Morton, 13, said: "I never get tired of it. That would be like getting tired of Christmas."

In its native Russia, Nutcracker is as much a New Year's happening as a Christmas ballet. At the Bolshoi in Moscow, there are no children's matinees and no children among the dancers. Still, tickets were impossible to come by last week. In the U.S., each year seems to bring a new production somewhere. This week at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the American Ballet Theater begins a two-week run with a new Nutcracker choreographed by and starring Mikhail Baryshnikov. In New York City, alas, Balanchine's 22-year-old production, the best and most popular of all contemporary versions, was stopped by a musicians' strike in the middle of a sold-out ($200,000 weekly gross) five-week run.

There are, perhaps forgivably, some dancers who eventually come to view the show about as charitably as a harpsichordist girding for his umpty-umpth Messiah. A child might think it sheer bliss to be able to perform The Waltz of the Snowflakes. Says Vassilie Trunoff, ballet master of the London Festival Ballet: "I call it The Dance of the Cornflakes' because we've got corns on our feet from dancing it so often." There are few major dancers or choreographers whose careers have not crossed that of Herr Drosselmeyer, Marie (or Clara, as she is sometimes known) or the Sugar Plum Fairy. Dame Margot Fonteyn made her debut at Sadler's Wells in 1934 as a snowflake. Both Rudolf Nureyev and Baryshnikov danced the prince as young men in Leningrad, as did Balanchine himself some 60 years ago.

Like the works of the Brothers Grimm, The Nutcracker is susceptible to many interpretations. The original is a story written in 1816 by that master of the grim and macabre, E.T.A. Hoffmann. The nutcracker is not only a toy but a prince imprisoned inside a nutcracker--a sort of young man in a wooden mask. Alexandre Dumas the Elder rewrote part of Hoffmann's gothic tale for children, and it was the Dumas version that Tchaikovsky and Choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov used for the ballet.

Good Witch. The original ballet scenario is closely adhered to by Balanchine, but used more loosely by others. Baryshnikov, in his final rehearsals in Washington last week, seemed living proof of Balanchine's dictum: "When the great dancers take over, they want to dance." Like Nureyev, whose version has been done by London's Royal Ballet since 1968, Baryshnikov takes a psychological view of Nutcracker. He is not interested in waltzing flowers, child performers or even the Sugar Plum Fairy. He gives the fairy's dance to Clara, who is played by the exquisitely elfin Marianna Tcherkassky. He adds a pas de trois for Clara, Drosselmeyer (Alexander Minz) and himself as the prince. The dramatic interplay within this trio, as much as spectacle and pageantry, is the stuff of his Nutcracker.

Baryshnikov's aim is to show, through pure dance, Clara's emotional growth. He sees the ballet as "a beautiful dream, but not so innocent. Good and evil wage their battle for a child's heart." Both the good and the evil are pretty much the work of Drosselmeyer, whom Baryshnikov regards as a blend of Svengali, Mephisto and the Good Witch of the North. Explains Baryshnikov: "In her beautiful dream, where Clara is dancing with the nutcracker prince, Drosselmeyer sees that she is very involved in an unreal beauty. He has created this experience for her, now he will destroy it. 'Come, it is time to return to reality,' he says, and in an act of sorcery. Clara is transported from the fairy-tale kingdom back to her own room. It is like life. The more you try to clutch your dream, the more quickly you wake up. It is sad, no?"

Baryshnikov's innovations are tame compared with some of the other variations that have been introduced under the guise of freshening up an old classic. In a 1929 production in Leningrad, the flowers waltzed on bicycles. Currently at the Hamburg State Opera Ballet, Choreographer John Neumeier makes Drosselmeyer a Petipa-like ballet master. Instead of going off to candy land, Marie is led by Drosselmeyer to an empty theater stage, where she learns how a ballet production develops. Neumeier's inspiration was necessity: there was no money for sets when he first staged Nutcracker in 1971 at the Frankfurt Ballet, and so he worked with a virtually bare stage.

Soft Shoe. One of the most radical Nutcrackers is the Roland Petit version, which moved from a sold-out run in Marseilles to a similarly successful stand in Paris last week. In Act I, after the nutcracker is injured, the children take up straw hats and do a soft-shoe routine. Instead of the long-legged belly dancer beloved by many American dads, a muscle-bound male in gold briefs does the traditional Arabian Dance.

It is in the U.S. that Nutcracker has achieved its most phenomenal popularity. The first full-length version in the U.S. was staged by the San Francisco Ballet in 1944. This year there are at least 150 professional and amateur productions. Kids everywhere vie for a role in the ballet. When they get one, they can pose problems. One San Francisco production features a box of bonbons, played by very small children. Every year some tot goes on a crying jag. Last Christmas one child conquered her stage fright by downing a quick pizza and a hot pastrami. She could barely waddle out of the candy box, and staggered bleary-eyed around the stage.

At the Houston Ballet, Artistic Director Ben Stevenson keeps the children id line by threatening to toss them out for missing one rehearsal. There is not much he can do about the parents. One mother actually strode onstage during a key rehearsal and grabbed her child away because the family was having a dinner party. "It's a chore," Stevenson confesses. "But the merit is getting the children into the theater both on the stage and in the audience." At a performance in San Antonio, he says, "you could hear the children in the audience screaming with joy when Fritz scares Clara with the rat. There is no other ballet like that."

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