Going Nutcrackers in New York

On Groundhog Day, 1954, American Christmas changed forever. That evening the New York City Ballet premiered George Balanchine's full-length Nutcracker, whose immediate success at the box office and with most critics solidified the company's finances and inaugurated a new holiday tradition. While not the first American Nutcracker—San Francisco Ballet has performed it annually since William Christensen's 1944 version—Balanchine's Nutcracker introduced New York (and, through live televised performances, the nation) to a ballet America knew only through Tschaikovsky's orchestral suite and abridgments of the Act 2 divertissement by touring European troupes. Despite New York Times critic John Martin's attack on Balanchine for abandoning avant-gardism to pander to popular tastes, the dance world quickly reached consensus that, as with all Balanchine's other attempts to please crowds and boost attendance (his 1949 one-act Firebird, his 1951 one-act Swan Lake), The Nutcracker, too, counted among his masterpieces. Since then, by collectively reaching back into our childhood, we have matured into "Nutcracker Nation," as Jennifer Fisher's 2003 book labels us: this past holiday season, America's dance lovers and dutiful parents could escort their Maries and Fritzes to any of over two hundred full-length productions. Children invariably seem to love The Nutcracker in any form, regardless of the company's professional skill, and watching the best and most inventive versions can sweep even jaded grownups into its balletic illusion and radical innocence.

At Nutcracker season, gray, savory New York becomes Capital of the Land of Sweets. Balanchine's production elbows aside the NYCB repertory from Thanksgiving until New Year's, but the city bounds and shimmers with others as well. In December 2010, two highly anticipated Nuts landed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Gilman Opera House, Mark Morris's 1991 The Hard Nut, absent from New York since 2002, and the world premiere of Alexei Ratmansky's Nutcracker for American Ballet Theatre, where he serves as Artist in Residence. Morris's Hard Nut, which I saw at a December 12 matinee, is that rare work of art that gleefully parodies traditional Nutcrackers and American Christmas, but with pranks and mischief that open into a haunting vision of beauty and love. I caught a matinee of Ratmansky's version, on December 30, and, though musically savvy and continuously absorbing, it tends to neglect its major ensembles and its larger sweep and purpose in favor of smaller but delicious touches. These performances, added to a December 11 evening with Balanchine's NYCB at Lincoln Center's Koch Theater, have kept Sugarplums dancing in my head well into 2011, and the crowds of mesmerized children at all three productions bring hope that they will carry these balletic visions into their adult lives and keep alive the audience for dance.

Balanchine's Act 1 Christmas party, at the comfy bourgeois home of Dr. and Frau Stahlbaum, unfolds in a world where festivity, order, and love play equal parts. Adults embrace warmly, the little girls share stories and, in unison, rock their new dolls, and Dr. Stahlbaum (impersonated with crisp panache by Justin Peck at this performance) benevolently maintains order, setting the little boys marching when their horseplay grows too disruptive. Because of the adults' exquisite and seductive control, few discordant notes disrupt the party, most of them struck by Marie's little brother Fritz (exuberant Gregor MacKenzie Gillen). When none of the girls chooses Fritz for a dance, his mother (Savannah Lowery) offers herself as his partner, and his sulkiness dissipates in the dance's gaiety. He most seriously trespasses, of course, by seizing Marie's gift from Herr Drosselmeier—her new Nutcracker—whirling it, dashing it to the ground, and stamping on it; yet this crime of sheer envy introduces Marie (delicately performed by Fiona Brennan) to the adult world of suffering and, through the care she lavishes on her broken toy, opens her imagination to the redemptive power of love.

"In Russia Christmas is a German invention," Balanchine told interviewers such as Nancy Reynolds and Solomon Volkov. His German-Russian festival borrows from his memories of the original 1892...