THE NUTCRACKER
Attending The Nutcracker has become a holiday tradition for many American families, and productions abound in every city. In Chicago, we’ve become accustomed to a long run every year of Ruth Page’s delightful version at the Arie Crown. But the Des Moines Ballet, recently renamed Ballet Iowa, has been bringing its own smaller-scale but uniquely humorous and charming version to Centre East for a number of years. I recall fondly a particularly funny scene with several plump chefs carrying oversize ladles.
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By changing the plot–and even the names of several characters–this production makes The Nutcracker more accessible, more tangible to the young viewer. Clara becomes Maria, her friend is Katherine, and Maria’s brother is Alex instead of Franz. Jonathan is the lucky boy who gets the toy soldier nutcracker, and Maria gets a ballerina nutcracker. By putting the Nutcracker in the familiar context of other toys, it becomes less of a rarity. (A child behind me asked her mother whether she had one of those, wondering why not.)
Napping, Maria has a dream that’s like a life-size version of the puppet theater, with Drosselmeyer (Tamas Szabev) transformed into the Prince and puppets from the theater helping him fight the Rat King (Christopher Flory). Maria (Carmen Rossi) comes to their aid by killing him, not with her slipper, as Clara traditionally does, but with the soldier’s detached head. The reunited Prince and Ballerina (Elizabeth Harano) take Maria to a winter wonderland complete with ice skaters, then back to the theater for a gala performance in her honor. The battling cohorts each perform a variation–Spanish, Arabian, Chinese, Russian, and Mirliton dances–and Maria is also treated to a Waltz of the Flowers (there’s no Sugarplum Fairy in sight, but we don’t miss her). When Maria wakes up, she can’t find her nutcracker toys. But a knowing look from Drosselmeyer before he leaves hints at a reason for their mysterious disappearance. When the curtains to the puppet theater are parted, there they both are, “united forever,” as the program synopsis puts it.
