Attitudes.

What does a well-bred balletomane do in a strange town over Christmas? He goes to sample the local versions of The Nutcracker, which is just what I did in my first holiday season in my native Britain in thirty-eight years. Why, oh why, you ask (should you be melodramatic, or optimistic, enough to ask questions of poor, dumb printed pages), in the blithe, spring-like month of April, am I writing about The Nutcracker, that most wintry and Christmassy of balletic occasions? Well, I would hate to disillusion anyone, but magazines have a long lead time, so what hopefully is springtime for the reader is still the chili of winter for the writer.

George Balanchine once told me that The Nutcracker was his favorite ballet. True or not--other days seemed to produce other favorites--certainly the master choreographer owed The Nutcracker more than a little. He first danced in it as a student in St. Petersburg, falling captive to its special, crystal magic, the warm cheer of its Christmas party giving way to a world as cold as a snowflake and as sweet as a sugarplum. Years later it became the annual meal ticket for Balanchine's ballet company and the basis of the most popular work he ever created.

Nowadays The Nutcracker seems to be the quintessential holiday ballet, associated the world over with seasonal cheer; certainly it is the engine that is essential to the financial stability of American ballet. Yet The Nutcracker had a shaky start, first in Russia and later in the rest of the world. Its establishment as the Christmas show of all Christmas shows, as the matchless holiday treat, is of comparatively recent origin. Tchaikovsky himself in 1891 had great difficulty in writing the music--sugarplums and other assorted candies never appealed to him much, and for a time he was at a loss to find sufficient inspiration to finish the score.

The idea of the ballet seemed sensible enough--in 1890 the czar's Imperial Ballet at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg had had a huge success with The Sleeping Beauty, and a year later the management wanted to repeat that hit by bringing together its composer, Tchaikovsky, and its choreographer, Marius Petipa. The story was taken from a tale by E.T.A. Hoffmann called "The Nutcracker and the King of the Mice." The original ballet, which was largely choreographed not by Petipa, who was ill, but by his assistant, Lev Ivanov, was moderately well received at its Russian premiere but never attained the popularity of The Sleeping Beauty or the later Petipa/Ivanov collaboration, Swan Lake.

The ballet slowly found a place in the Russian repertoire but, apart from the music, was far less well known to the rest of the world, and such productions as there were proved unsatisfactory and short-lived. Then in 1950 Anton Dolin's London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet) staged a very successful production with choreography by Nicholas Beriosov, and immediately the ballet, in various versions, became a permanent part of London's Christmas.

My all-time favorite English Nutcracker was Sir Frederick Ashton's near plotless 1951 version, with no Drosselmeyer, no Clara, no Christmas party, just the Kingdom of Snow and the Kingdom of the Sweets--and marvelous choreography, bingo, over and out. Many ballet critics (the late Richard Buckle once uncharitably began a review: "Heigh-ho, we are one more Nutcracker nearer death") are somewhat Scrooge-like toward the ballet, so it was with a grave sense of dedicated duty that I applied myself to London's three very different current versions. Yet duty offered a singular lesson, for in a way these three faces of The Nutcracker demonstrated three, universal approaches to ballet classics: the traditional, the radical, and the revisionist.

Not unexpectedly, the traditional came from The Royal Ballet, which in 1934 was the first Western company (then called Vie-Wells) to stage the complete Nutcracker, produced by Nicholas Sergeyev using the Stepanov notated text of the original Ivanov choreography. The present version by Peter Wright avowedly adapts some elements from the old Ivanov, and with its cozy designs by Julia Trevelyan Oman, is adequate and sweetly old-fashioned. Despite the stellar presence of Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg, it seemed academically fusty and less rewarding than the radical production that Rudolf Nureyev staged for The Royal Ballet in 1968.

London's new radical Nutcracker is that with a concept and design by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe and new choreography by the young and promising Christopher Hampson (see "25 to Watch," DANCE MAGAZINE, January, page 50). Unfortunately, Scarfe has virtually strangled the production; you are more aware of the cute or clever designs (the soldiers are paratroopers descending from the skies) than the rather odd dancing and characterizations.

London's revisionist Nutcracker is, of course, Matthew Bourne's irreverent, joyous, and enormously popular take on the old ballet, which, although choreographically far less sophisticated, might be compared with Mark Morris's The Hard Nut.

So there they were: three distinct ways of approaching any of the nineteenth-century ballet classics. And the lessons? Good dancing and sensible conceptual thinking never hurts any ballet classic. And great choreography is always a plus. If only we could bring back that long-lost Ashton!

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes, who covers dance and theater for the New York Post, has contributed to DANCE MAGAZINE since 1956.