The great nutcracker reunion.

On a December evening when the snow scene outside rivaled the one in the theater for its pristine beauty, the School of American Ballet held its Golden Jubilee Homecoming in honor of the 50th year of George Balanchine's Nutcracker. Out of the 2000 people who had performed in the New York City Ballet production as children in the last 50 years, 200 attended.

Never has the vast New York State Theater felt so intimate. After announcing that special guests Maria Tallchief and Peter Boal were snowed in (or rather, out), Peter Martins, Director of SAB faculty, asked what roles all the attending alumni had played. Soldiers? Angels? Candy Canes? Each time, a different group clapped noisily, occasionally cheering. 11 felt like a family squealing over old photo albums. The performance of The Nutcracker proceeded, in all its magical glory. Jennie Somogyi, who had played Marie as a child, danced a warm and full-bodied Sugar Plum with Charles Askegard stepping in for Boal as her Cavalier at the last minute.

Though some people were crestfallen that Boal and Tallchief couldn't attend--a teenager sighed that Tallchief was her personal hero--the dessert crowd was well entertained by Eliot Feld. "I had studied all of three months before I was chosen to be one of two princes," he told us about the first Nutcracker in 1954. "There were only two boys in the school, so it had more to do with genitalia than talent. It was a life-changing experience for ore. My whole sense of beautiful dancing was formed then. But," said renowned choreographer Feld, "when you're a prince at 11, it's all downhill from there."

AMONG THE guests were dancers Merrill Ashley and Judith Fugate, actress Zina Bethune, author Nancy Reynolds, dancer John Selya, and his sister, Candace Selya Gordon. Mary Bueno, a 1958 alumna who now works with the New York City Board of Education, said, "I learned that all onstage is a beautiful illusion, but the reality was that the dancers worked very hard."

Wendy Makkena, a 1967-74 Nutcracker participant who appears in Oliver Beene on Fox TV, said, "When I started to act, I had a built-in discipline and a sense of where I was onstage. I was so al home in my body that I could do psychological gestures better than other beginning actors."

David Richardson, the children's Ballet Master from 1968 to 1983 (and a former Prince). said, "What taught me the most about little changes were the children themselves. [The party scene] is blocked, but they created their own atmosphere--who they are and what they do. When we first started this the girls were uncomfortable about touching and hugging each other [during the greetings]. One year a particular Marie, who must have grown up in a warm family, hugged the other girls and got them to hug her back. She created a very natural romance among her friends, and I was able to translate that in future casts."