'Nutcracker Festival' a financial success, SFB heads into season.

SAN FRANSISCO--What do you do when you have a much-acclaimed Nutcracker and no place to perform it? This was the dilemma facing San Francisco Ballet this season. With the War Memorial Opera House unavailable for another year while it's being renovated, SFB had to either cancel its major money-maker or find an alternate venue. Loath to break with tradition--SFB was the first American company to perform Nutcracker in 1944--Helgi Tomasson went for a fairly radical solution. (Tomasson and Lew and William Christensen choreographed SFB's version of the holiday classic.)

The Palace of Fine Arts theater has a large lobby. SFB decided that instead of having audiences watch the first act Christmas party at the Stahlbaums', it would invite them to participate in the festivities. Visitors were greeted outside the theater by the chestnut vendor; they then could have their picture taken with cardboard cutouts of SFB dancers as Nutcracker characters; sweets were offered; a magician entertained; and, finally, a condensed version of the first act's drama, including the fight between the Mouse King and the Prince, was pantomimed on a ministage. From there the audience proceeded to their seats where the second act, preceded by the Waltz of the Snowflakes, was presented.

With this "Nutcracker Holiday Festival," SFB made the best of a bad situation. The result was satisfactory--through by no means ideal. The lobby scene tended towards the chaotic, with parents impatiently trying to keep track of their children; at least one little girl, five-year-old Lizza Hullar was unhappy. "She was very disappointed," her mother explained. "She wanted to see the party scene." On the other hand, Florence Howard and her husband were delighted. "I thought it was just fine--anything they have to do to get through this period is fine with us," she said.

It's an assessment that SFB spokesman Alvin Henry could agree with. "We budgeted the show [to earn] $648,000 and have exceeded that goal," he reported. "We presented the same number of shows, but 16,000 instead of last year's 100,000 people saw it." In 1995, SFB took in $3.8 million with Nutcracker.

Resuming its peripatetic journeys between the Palace of Fine Arts, Yerba Buena Center and Zellerbach Hall, SFB opens its season with a gala February 3. Because of the logistics, the season, February 12-May 25, offers no evening-length ballets. However, there are five works new to SFB, including three world premieres and the SFB premieres of Christopher Bruce's Sergeant Early's Dream and Ben Stevenson's Four Last Songs.

At press time, Tomasson and Val Caniparoli had not decided on names for their new works. Tomasson will use selections from scores by Charles Avison glossing on Scarlatti and Arnold Schoenberg doing the same for Handel. Caniparoli's work is inspired by Fellini movie composer Nino Rota.

Lila York's SFB premiere, El Grito, owes much to her recent reading on courageous Latin Americans, both contemporary ones and historical figures such as Father Hidalgo and Simon Bolivar. Considering what's going on in the world, she says, "It's hard to keep up faith and hope. Yet there are people all over who manage to keep on struggling despite the odds." The work is set on four principals and a corps of fourteen. York will also stage Paul Taylor's Sunset on SFB. "It's a sweet, melancholy piece," she explains, "with a beautiful duet for two men."