The Nutz: versions new and old arrive with the holidays plus a feast of faux pas.

CRACKING NUTS WILL BE MORE OF AN ADVENTURE THAN USUAL THIS YEAR. Two LEADING STATESIDE COMPANIES, THE SAN FRANCISCO BALLET AND THE WASHINGTON BALLET, WILL UNVEIL NEW PRODUCTIONS THAT BLEND THE SEASONAL FABLE WITH THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNITIES THEY SERVE. THE U. S. ALSO GETS ITS FIRST LOOK AT THE BRILLIANT, UNORTHODOX MATTHEW BOURNE STAGING THAT HAS BECOME A HOLIDAY STAPLE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM. WE HAVE SUGGESTIONS, TOO, FOR SAVORING NUTCRACKER FUN AT HOME. AND IN CASE YOU CAN SPARE A MOMENT TO LAUGH DURING THESE FRAZZLING WEEKS, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR CHERYL OSSOLA HAS COOKED UP A TASTY BATCH OF NUTCRACKER MISHAPS THAT ARE MORE FUN TO READ ABOUT THAN TO EXPERIENCE. JEST IN TIME, TOO.--ALLAN ULRICH

Nutcracker! BOURNE AGAIN

BY ALASTAIR MACAULAY

For some choreographers, staging The Nutcracker is one of their big ambitions. For Matthew Bourne, however, it came as a complete surprise. It was 1992. He'd only been a professional choreographer for five years; he was in his early thirties; his company, Adventures in Motion Pictures as it was then called, had just six dancers, one of them himself. But 1992 was the centenary of the St. Petersburg premiere of Tchaikovsky's double bill of the ballet, The Nutcracker, and the opera, Yolanta, and the enterprising Opera North had the bright idea of reprising both pieces in new-look productions. The director Martin Duncan, already a fan of some of Bourne's earlier work, invited him to make the ballet.

The Nutcracker! that Bourne invented with Duncan (whose name remains on the credits, although Bourne has made changes since then) bears many of the hallmarks of the work that Bourne has been staging ever since. There's less of E. T. A. Hoffmann's original story than in almost any other version, and numerous new characters (Bourne expanded the size of his company from six to eighteen, and stopped dancing himself). Loads of suspense, too. No choreographer can have ever held his central Nutcracker narrative in doubt for longer. Only as the final curtain is about to come down do we see--at last!--how the story is going to wind up, and who'll end up with whom.

It has its share of darkness. This is a Nutcracker with plenty of heart--and indeed heartbreak, sometimes at moments when nobody, except perhaps Tchaikovsky himself, has had heartbreak in mind. Yet what impresses most here is not cloud but silver lining: It's bright, naughty, and (despite 20th-century costumes) oddly Dickensian. Most Nutcrackers start in the family home, yet Bourne makes it a story about familylessness--about children in an orphanage, like a modern-dress version of the one in Oliver Twist. And if you know the wonderfully horrid Squeers family in Nicholas Nickleby (before he took up dancing, Bourne loved the classic 1980-81 Royal Shakespeare Company staging), you may recognize traces of them in the creeps who run Bourne's Nutcracker orphanage, Dr. and Mrs. Dross with their monster children Fritz and Sugar. As in Dickens, these are gorgons you love to hate: You laugh at how they appall you.

Bourne approached his story with the theater sense that marks all his work. What's the story? How do we keep the plot going? What's the music saying, and to what extent do we go with and/or against it? Bourne's story is all about giving these orphans the ideas that underlie the idea of Christmas--winter sports, sweets, magic, travel, family, love. The ballet's snow scene becomes a skating party (respired By Sonja Henie movies), its kingdom of sweets becomes a funny but sickly-sweet Busby Berkeley Sweetieland of false values, and the whole tension of the show has to do with the feelings of orphaned children who, especially at Christmastime, are outsiders looking in.

Bourne's 1992 Clara, Etta Murfitt, is still dancing the role. She can still look childlike, although she's now a mother herself and is also one of the company's rehearsal directors. "As soon as I saw Matthew's work for Adventures in Motion Pictures in the 1980s, I thought 'That's what I want to do'. It was funny and clever, and it always gives the audience a good time. Then, when I joined the company, I found the whole creative process exciting: We contribute, and we're included in everything. And when we re-rehearse it today, we're always looking for ways in which to connect the music and the story yet better."

I have known Bourne since 1982. He was 22, just starting a BA in dance theatre at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London; I was 27, teaching dance history there. I saw his student choreography, and knew then that he was the outstanding talent of a gifted crop of students. In the late 1990s, he asked me to collaborate with him on a book of interviews about his work, and I became fascinated by how many questions I could ask, and how undefensive the answers were.

Today, he is the most prestigious choreographer in Britain, and there are times when his productions can be seen simultaneously in three different London theaters. His company is now called New Adventures, but it's his name that is used to stamp his productions (Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker! and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is how these productions are sold all over Britain). And there are dancers in New Adventures who only took up dancing because they fell in love with his work when they were children. Yet it's astonishing how much he is still like the 22-year-old who was doing his first ballet lessons when I first knew him: relaxed, unspoiled, cheerful.

"When we made Nutcracker!," Bourne says, "we didn't know whether we could take on 18 dancers. We six had been character-actors, but most of us were limited in terms of sheer dance technique. Today, everybody in the company is a better dancer--the old ones included! But what matters more is the opposite: We've never lost that feeling for characterization we all had in the first place. The dancers are all motivated. There's never a moment when they're expected to move just because they've been told to. They know why their characters are doing this to that music."

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!

SKATING TO CALIFORNIA

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker! runs through Dec. 5 at Zellerbach Hall, University at California, Berkeley; Dec. 7-12 at Segerstrom Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa; and Dec. 15-19 at Royce Hall, UCLA.

Alastair Macaulay is the chief theater critic of The Financial Times and the chief dance critic of the Times Literary Supplement. His book of interviews, Matthew Bourne and his Adventures in Motion Pictures, was published in 2000 by Faber & Faber.

Septime Webre's Capital Nutcracker

Crammed with Americana and hometown references, The Washington Ballet's new production of The Nutcracker stands out among theatrical productions this month in the nation's capital. Masterminded by artistic director Septime Webre, this version retains the Tchaikovsky score, Hoffmann's story line, and the classic Sugar Plum pas de deux. And it pays homage to the two forces that shaped the company--founder Mary Day, whose legacy is glimpsed in the party scene, and late choreographer Choo San Goh, whose Chinese dance remains partially intact. Otherwise it's Webre's show, set in Georgetown in 1882 and drenched in U.S. culture--"a magical ballet," says the production's London-based set designer Peter Horne, "that will surprise and thrill the audience."

Official Washington is on board. The District of Columbia will be appropriating several hundred thousand dollars, and collaborators include the National Building Museum and the Smithsonian Associates.

But Webre acknowledges that he has big shoes to fill. The $1 million extravaganza continues a tradition begun in 1961 when Mary Day first staged the holiday favorite. Her Nutcracker introduced generations of Washingtonians to ballet and showcased some of the nation's most promising talent--the young Kevin McKenzie (now artistic director of ABT) as a Candy Cane, for example, and Marianna Tcherkassky in the Star solo choreographed for the budding ballerina (now ballet mistress at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre). Conventional perhaps, but polished and utterly charming, the production withstood stiff competition, season after season. "I would be more than happy to continue to produce that Nutcracker," Webre maintains, "but Mary Day retired this year and she wanted it to retire with her."

Webre's concept has undoubtedly benefited from his undergraduate degree in history. Act I opens with an act of kindness toward a Civil War veteran outside a mansion filled with paintings and gifts that reflect the era's fascination with the Far West and the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass, the intellectual voice of the 19th-century African American community, appears among the contemporaries invited to the party; Humpty Dumpty--a nursery rhyme character, Webre points out, originally intended to spoof George III--is wheeled into the ballroom, cracks open, and out spills John Paul Jones, the American naval hero of the Revolutionary War. The Rat King resembles the British monarch; the rats, his Redcoats; the toy soldiers, the Continental Army; and the Nutcracker, a young George Washington.

Nonetheless, cautions Judanna Lynn, who designed the production's 200 plus new outfits, the ballet is not a documentary. "We're just having fun with the characters," she explains. The Act II divertissements, set among cherry trees on the banks of the Potomac, feature Anacostia Indians in the Arabian variation, a Davey Crockett-ish trapper in the Trepak, cardinals in tutus as mirlitons, and an entire American circus as Mother Ginger, her skirt its working carousel. A history-laden puppet show mounted by Drosselmeyer allows Clara, the ballet's focus, to dream anachronistically, thus resolving any inconsistencies.

The cast includes 200 Washington School of Ballet students, plus about 20 first- and second-graders from WB's outreach program as mushrooms and butterflies. Webre hopes that his production will become a training ground and a community institution on a par with Day's. "In the first year, it will seem newfangled," he admits. "But over time the choreographer tinkers with the production and after a while it no longer belongs to him but to the dancers who contribute to it. I suspect the production we see December 10, 2004, will be quite different from the production of 2010."--PAULA DURBIN

California Dreaming

Bordering Alamo Square in San Francisco, there stands a row of six Victorian houses that face west. Called the Painted Ladies, these colorful gingerbread houses have become emblems of the city's eccentricity and charm.

When the San Francisco Ballet announced that it would mount a new production of The Nutcracker, the company said it would aim for a ballet that would speak to and for San Francisco. On December 17, when the curtain rises on Helgi Tomasson's first complete Nutcracker, SFB's fifth production since 1944, we will meet the Stahlbaum family in the parlor of their landmark Victorian home inspired by the Painted Ladies.

The time is Christmas Eve, 1915, and Clara Stahlbaum is 13. World War I has begun in Europe, but life in the U.S. remains peaceful, and San Francisco has finally recovered from the devastating 1906 earthquake. In fact, at night from the second-story windows of one of the Painted Ladies, a young girl might have glimpsed the San Francisco World's Fair, called the Pan Pacific International Exposition, constructed in what is now the Marina District. The fair featured exotic pavilions from all over the world, including a 43-story Palace of Jewels, to celebrate the new Panama Canal, which cut travel distance from Europe to San Francisco by 18,000 miles. Taking his inspiration for Act II from the exposition, Tomasson said, "I thought what an incredible event it must have been, not only for adults, but for children. It must have been an eye-opener."

In linking the ballet to an historical event, Tomasson and his artistic team--Tony Award-winning costume designer Martin Pakledinaz and renowned opera set designer Michael Yeargan, in his first ballet assignment--hope to anchor Clara's fantasies in a collective experience of a small city glimpsing the larger world. "It's a dream about San Francisco," said Pakledinaz. "But it is also more than a dream. It's about a girl who realizes that the world is so much bigger than her Family or her town."

"The setting could be anywhere," said Tomasson, who is underwriting the production with a portion of a 30-year, $20 million state bond issued to SFB two years ago. "But because San Francisco was the first place in the country to mount the [full-length] Nutcracker, I felt it would be very appropriate to set it here." When asked if taking the story out of Biedermeier Prussia into post-Edwardian San Francisco trifled with a classic, he was blunt. "I look at it this way: This is just my interpretation of this music and story, and it may not be someone else's."

At press time, Tomasson had completed most of Act II, the particulars of which remain secret, while he was waiting until the company returned from its European tour to set Act I. Over the last two years, the Nutcracker team has labored to tighten the tale's often desultory narrative, deleting the nephew from the plot of the old 1984 production, and focusing the action on Drosselmeyer and Clara, who is transformed by her love for an imagined Nutcracker Prince. In a city to which people have migrated since the Gold Rush to follow their dreams, the new SFB Nutcracker may just give the dreamers their due.--ANN MURPHY 

Nutcracker Mishaps and MAYHEM

BY CHERYL OSSOLA

The Nutcracker's magic is undeniable. Year after year, audiences return to lose themselves in the fantasy of dancing snowflakes and flowers, that giant Christmas tree, that urinating alpaca ... Oh, you missed that one? It's one of the many mishaps to befall this beloved tradition. True, the boredom of a long run can prompt "creative" antics onstage; hardly a Snowflake has escaped an avalanche, courtesy of chuckling stagehands who take a matte knife to the snow bag. But most are unintentional--scenery or props gone AWOL, "wardrobe malfunctions," prop-swallowing orchestra pits. And as these stories from schools and companies prove, they're also universal.

Body fluids can be an unexpected part of this holiday ritual, especially when yours includes livestock. In BalletMet Columbus' 2003 parody, A Nutty Nutcracker, an alpaca was among the "special guests." Standing patiently backstage awaiting its entrance, it suddenly peed. A lot. Apparently an alpaca's bladder capacity is impressive--everyone from the backstage crew to the executive director took turns with mops and paper towels.

A tiny San Francisco Ballet Angel in the mid-1980s one-upped that alpaca by peeing onstage. SFB education coordinator Evelyn Cisneros-Legate said, "Since the little one danced her part with authority, the wet line crossed the stage, but the Sugar Plum Fairy, Laurie Cowden, managed to dance around the puddles. As I recall, someone entered under Mother Ginger's skirt to mop up before the grand pas."

Fluid of another kind saturated Pointe Dance Academy's 1977 outdoor performance on St. Croix: rain and more rain. "The snowflakes sloshed their way through it, spinning around stagehands armed with mops and buckets," wrote Co-Director Heidi Wright. "Pointe shoes began to disintegrate, and the lighting crew looked aghast as water dripped steadily closer to old wiring.

"One advantage of island living is that rum is cheap, so the audience took advantage of what became a 90-minute intermission. At the end, whether through the spirit of the dance or another kind of spirits, the audience rose to its feet and stayed there through a multitude of bows. Then they shook off their umbrellas and headed home."

Drosselmeyers have to be able to think on their feet--or hope that sharp-minded crew members will. Ballet Arizona production manager Malinda Brommel saved the day for one Drosselmeyer, who, behind his outstretched cape, was supposed to slip the Nutcracker-turned-Prince a crown. "He had forgotten it, and because the stage was wide open, there was no opportunity for someone to nonchalantly deliver it. So I sneaked behind some scenery and Frisbee-tossed the crown to him under cover of his upraised cape. It hit his chest and fell into the Prince's hands, and the scene continued without a glitch."

A Houston Ballet Drosselmeyer, Tim O'Keefe, coped with a remote-controlled mouse that died onstage by changing the choreography and tossing the corpse into the wings--very professionally, of course. And Shaun O'Brien, an NYCB Drosselmeyer, described pretending to have a nutcracker: "Someone forgot to put it under the tree, and when the little Prince came to bring it to me, he said, 'It's not there]' So I did the scene in pantomime until they smuggled it in to me, then I held it up as if I'd had it the whole time."

Orchestra pits are the ballet world's equivalent of Charlie Brown's kite-eating tree, although less selective. Ballet Arizona once served up a nutcracker's head when all overly enthusiastic Fritz slammed the toy down. The cellist whose $90,000 instrument the projectile had narrowly missed was too miffed to retrieve it, leaving Drosselmeyer to "repair" a headless nutcracker. Now that's magic!

Houston Ballet's pit nearly consumed a whole dancer one time. A student doubling as a rat and a snowflake missed her exit when the shower cap underneath her rat head slipped over her eyes. She caught her leg in a bank of lights and fell, dangling headfirst into the pit while everyone looked on in horror. The curtain dropped, the unharmed dancer was rescued, and the drama-tinged show went on.

Technical problems challenge any dancer, but it doesn't help if you can't see. NYCB assistant to the ballet master in chief Sean Lavery described a grand pas de deux with Kay Mazzo in their pre-contact-lens days: "Neither of us could see very well, and when we moved upstage so she could step on a small platform that's pulled across the stage, we couldn't find it. So we're just standing there, squinting at the floor, when it comes zooming out of the wings. Kay jumped on and it took her across the stage way too fast and practically threw her into the wings."

In another NYCB glitch, a late-closing trap door turned a little of four soldiers into three. And in 1956, in a Ballet Concert Group of Baltimore production, Barbara Owen and her Cavalier found themselves dancing molto presto to a 33-rpm record--played at 45 rpm. Owen remembers, "The applause was polite, our embarrassment enormous."

Then there was the fiery Christmas tree in Camden [Maine] School of Dance's 2001 production. The smoke machines had been primed for the battle scene when dancer Stephen Lawrence noticed that the air was already smoky. "The tree was smoking! Little flames were crawling all over it--the audience thought it was a special effect! When the curtain went down we sprang into action, dousing the tree and dragging the burnt remains out into the parking lot. The dancers put on one of the season's best performances and the audience was never the wiser."

No run of this ballet would be complete without a wardrobe malfunction or two. At the Joffrey Ballet, one loose knot on a pearl-bedecked Arabian costume suddenly unleashed a torrent of rolling orbs that made dancing impossible. Drosselmeyer came to the rescue, doing "lovely improvisational crossovers" in front of a hastily dropped curtain.

But no wardrobe disaster can top photographer Martha Swope's experience as an Angel in the 1950s: "We wore 25-pound costumes made of felt, and hoop skirts underneath. And we wore nothing under them but our underwear because it was very, hot standing onstage for the entire second act. One night one of the girls passed out, and when she fell the hoop bulged up and sire was exposed up to her neck. Andre Eglevsky came leaping out of the wings--grand jete, run run run, grand jete, run run run and out of the side of his mouth he was saying, 'Get that girl offstage! Get her off!' and he did a big circle and said it again, and finally, one of the stagehands reached out and gingerly pulled her offstage by one arm."

From small-town schools to urban mega-companies, every Nutcracker production is unique, and so are its bloopers and blunders. But the people involved have one thing in common: They'll be telling their stories for years, adding them to the millions of fond memories surrounding this holiday tradition.

Cheryl Ossola is a contributing editor of DM.

Nutcracker Gifts

Baryshnikov's Nutcracker Kultur. DVD. 78 minutes, $29.95.

Mikhail Baryshnikov's Nutcracker became a holiday staple for a generation of aspiring ballet dancers, thanks to repeated television broadcasts and a successful video release. Now, with its release on DVD, a new generation can enjoy a cast that will send chills up any aspiring ballerina's tutu. American Ballet Theatre's 1977 production has historical as well as artistic significance.

This version stars Mikhail Baryshnikov as the Nutcracker and Gelsey Kirkland as Clara, both at the height of their careers. Kirkland--who left New York City Ballet to dance with Baryshnikov at ABT--has a lightening quickness, and a round, full, port de bras that gives her dancing a unique beauty. Joy and exuberance fill her every step. Baryshnikov's sharp, precise movements in the battle scene and his technical purity in the grand pas de deux, not to mention his grace and charisma, remain unmatched.

This Nutcracker marked Baryshnikov's choreographic debut. Filmed on what appears to be an enormous soundstage with luxurious sets and costumes, and directed by Tony Charmoli, it takes you on Clara's journey from an Imperial-era Russian Christmas party to the grand pas de deux. Multiple camera angles and Ziegfield Follies-type bird's-eye-view, shot, capture the choreography in ways that a performance onstage does not permit. Voiceover narration explains the plot to viewers who are new to the ballet. But it's the phenomenal dancing that will bring you back to this DVD again and again to watch your favorite scenes.

--KATE LYDON

The Nutcracker: The Story and the Magic

By Angela Whitehill and William Noble Foreward by Wendy Whelan New Jersey: Princeton Book Company 120 pages, illustrated. 2004. $29.95

Who doesn't remember their first Nutcracker? A Christmas tree grows before our very eyes. Snowflakes dancing on tip-toe to Tchaikovsky. A little girl sails above the stage with her Prince. Yet depending on the production, there also may be flying bats, a Drosselmeyer performing on pointe and a manly Mother Ginger. The Nutcracker: The Story and the Magic shows how companies around the world have created their own productions of the classic. The result is a book that Nutcracker fanatics of all ages will enjoy.

Angela Whitehill, former ballet dancer with the Ballet de Paris, and William Noble take the reader not only onto the stage, but behind it, explaining, for instance, the casting process, and how it varies. Both the rehearsals and the story are elaborated upon with photographs of an array of companies. From London, where Matthew Bourne's dancers must learn to skate across the stage, to New York, where American Ballet Theatre snowflakes must maneuver themselves through 62 pounds of dry ice and fake snow, The Nutcracker's diversity is captured.

With a forward by New York City Ballet principal Wendy Whelan, who went from pint-sized polichinelle to Sugar Plum Fairy, this book reveals the ballet's backstage secrets. For those who don't wish to know how the tree grows or how dozens of children emerge front Mother Ginger's billowing skirt, some magic is lost. However, the insightful (and often hilarious) stories Whitehill and Noble tell make it all worth it.

--JESSIE MALE

The Nutcracker Sweet

By Linda Hymes. San Francisco: Lindergaff Books. 156 pages, illustrated. 2004. $26

If you've ever left The Nutcracker craving marzipan or a chocolate tart--and whipping up wonderful desserts is your hobby--this cookbook belongs in your kitchen. Linda Hymes, a ballerina-turned-chef, has taken the ballet's familiar characters and scenes, and created dishes to complement each. Some recipes verge on the challenging: The "Mother Ginger Trifle with Chunky Apple Compote and Cognac Custard," for instance, requires making each element from scratch. Others, like the "Sunflower Seed and Sesame Brittle," are easy-to-make post-class or rehearsal snacks.

Like all serious dancers--and cooks--Hymes puts a premium on technique. The book's highlights include thoughtful tips on how to make crepes, infuse sugar, and handle chocolate so it doesn't burn while it's melting. Derek Gaffney's lush, seductive photographs accompany Hymes' recipes, as do charming illustrations by Noah Gelber, a former Frankfurt Ballet principal. Even if you know you'll never make the "Prince of Almonds Torte with Coffee Buttercream and Chocolate Ganache," you'll savor The Nutcracker Sweet's delicious sugarplum feast.

--HANNA RUBIN