New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker with Robert La Fosse as Herr Drosselmeier. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Yes, we—believers and doubters alike—take our children, grandchildren, and godchildren to see the New York City Ballet dance George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker, created in 1954 and an annual Christmastide event ever since. Many youngsters also dance in it, if they’re being trained at the School of American Ballet, the company’s rigorous academy. But this ballet is in no way mere kiddie fare. It offers the adult much food for thought—and reverie.
After Tchaikovsky’s celestial overture—during which we gaze at a front drop showing an angel spreading starlight over the snow-covered roofs of a gemütlich German town some 200 years ago—we get our first glimpse of a pair of children gazing with unquenchable curiosity at a world from which, for one good reason or other, they have been excluded. Marie and her rambunctious kid brother peer through the keyhole into the drawing room where their parents are putting the finishing touches on the massive candlelit Christmas tree and arranging the presents destined for the children and their young cousins and friends who are about to arrive. The firmly shut door means “Children, you may not look—yet.”
The ensuing party is a lively one, tamed by the grace of formal social dancing in which three generations join and the examples of civilized adult manners, along with friendly admonitions to over-boisterous youngsters. It harbors areas of mystery, too. They center on the presence of the elderly, eccentric Godfather Drosselmeier (accompanied by a solemn handsome nephew just a few years older than Marie and the rough-and-tumble boys at the festivities).
Drosselmeier seems capable of magical feats far more complex than the scarf tricks with which he first entertains the children. An ingenious inventor of mechanical toys, he has fashioned adult-size wind-up dolls and, especially for Marie, whose fancy it captures immediately, a foot-high working nutcracker in soldier’s garb. But then her overexcited, jealous little brother seizes it and dashes it to the floor so that its jaws, with their prominent teeth, can no longer crack nuts to deliver their sweet kernels.
When the party ends, as all parties must, and the guests have departed, Marie reappears in the deserted drawing room in her angelic nightclothes. She has left her bed to succor her beloved Nutcracker. The young girl—a tiny, fragile figure in the large, silent room—peers through its French windows at the wintry midnight townscape, but it is too dark to make anything out. It’s a lonely moment, and she comforts herself by curling up on the sofa, cradling her broken treasure.
School of American Ballet students in New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Now vivid clues to more frightening, perhaps evil, aspects of life are introduced into Marie’s home—in which she is used to being cosseted with love, creature comforts, and safety—seemingly because the prepubescent girl is getting old enough to come face to face with a few threatening adult realities. Under the cover of night, Godfather Drosselmeier returns, mends the Nutcracker for the child he clearly adores, displays its face beside his own as if to point out a resemblance—and conjures up an army of mice.
More and more, as the decades have slipped by, the rodents—the king with seven heads, each crowned, his rodent family and friends, and a bevy of rodent offspring (a grotesque parallel to the human guests at the Christmas Eve party?)—have made the ensuing scene of the battle with the mice more comic than scary, a pity, I think; the balance was more effective when it went the opposite way.
Marie awakens to witness startling transformations. The Christmas tree grows to gargantuan size. The toy soldiers, neatly arranged in a case in the drawing room grow to her own height and come to life to battle the mice. The bed that Drosselmeier’s nephew earlier offered Marie for her broken Nutcracker magically scoots away as if of its own volition to be replaced by a life-size bed, and the Nutcracker, now grown as well, charges into battle to protect the terrified Marie. The changes of size and awakening to new powers hint at the physical and emotional processes of puberty, during which a child can seem to grow in body and soul overnight.
It is through the mice’s invasion, though, that Marie’s mettle is tested. The valiant Nutcracker is responsible for the necessary swordplay, but when it looks as if he may be defeated, Marie has the courage and the presence of mind to distract the Mouse King by throwing her slipper at him, so the prince can get the upper hand, slaughter the royal rodent, and hold aloft one of its seven golden crowns. (The boy will give Marie full credit for her bravery in recounting the event to the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II—in a pantomime solo Balanchine himself performed as a ballet student at Russia’s renowned Maryinsky Theatre.)
Meanwhile, again as if by magic, the Nutcracker is stripped in the blink of an eye of his soldier outfit to reveal the elegant costume of a storybook princeling. With immaculate chivalry, he presents the tiny, gleaming crown to Marie and leads her out into the landscape she only peered at through the window earlier, it being imperceptible to her while she was a child sheltered in her own home. The scene they traverse is a forest swept by falling snow, with (human) snowflakes whirling through it, as if wafted by the wind. This is the realm of unmarred nature in which events once conjured up only by the imagination are now really about to take place.
At the Christmas party, we also witness Marie’s early lessons in love, first when she cuddles her Nutcracker while her little cousins and girlfriends rock the dolls they’ve received as presents, then when she solemnly shakes the hand of Drosselmeier’s nephew, to thank him for bringing her the miniature bed in which her injured Nutcracker can repose. Lastly, once the other guests have left for home, the boy escorted away by his uncle, the girl led off to bed in the opposite direction by her mother on a darkening stage, each of the youngsters extends a yearning arm toward the other, as if to promise that the bond beginning to form between them will not be broken.
New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
In Act II, when Marie and the Nutcracker Prince find themselves in the Kingdom of Sweets ruled over by the Sugar Plum Fairy, we’ve entered the domain of imagination given free rein. In one way it’s an homage to the ingenuous childish dream of possessing the full spectrum of deliciousness. In another, it contains a moral: the youngsters are being rewarded for mature, adroit behavior in their encounter with the marauding mice. Balanchine, as he said on another occasion, is having his cake and eating it.
Sweets from all corners of the universe are presented to the regally enthroned children and dance for them—candy canes, marzipan shepherdesses, hot chocolate—each according to its kind. Eventually, though, it’s time for Marie and her young prince to return to ordinary life, albeit in a magical sleigh pulled by reindeer that fly through the air. Imagination has been given its due and the youngsters have had their vision of pleasure which will no doubt sustain them throughout their lives, but there may be some relief, too, in returning to the familiarity of the commonplace.
Balanchine teaches many a lesson in The Nutcracker but doesn’t press any of them upon the spectator. They are simply there to be ferreted out or absorbed unconsciously, and all the more intriguing for that. For example, the choreographer uses children of different ages (giving each group dance material within its capabilities, which is then brilliantly executed), fully professional adult dancers of varying ranks, company apprentices in walk-ons, and a few senior artists in character roles. In this way, Balanchine shows how a dancer usually begins as an absurdly young child and then (if the will and the body hold fast and luck blesses the enterprise) progresses, stage by hard-worn stage, in his exacting trade.
Balanchine’s Nutcracker is also a treatise on the nature of reality and illusion—and a child’s uncanny ability to live in both worlds, moving fluidly between them. In the more rigidly compartmentalized adult world, this is a gift most often retained by artists.
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