DANCE REVIEW
A ‘Nutcracker’ Sprouts Alter Egos
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
American Ballet Theater: Kenneth Easter is Mother Ginger in Alexei Ratmansky’s new production of “The Nutcracker,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Jan 2. More Photos »
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Published: December 24, 2010
Once you’ve seen a number of different “Nutcrackers,” you might think you know all the main ways that the old ballet can be retold. But you don’t.
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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Clara and her Nutcracker as adults.More Photos »
In Alexei Ratmansky’s new version of “The Nutcracker,” currently in its world premiere season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Ballet Theater has a production like no other. Made with complete theatrical authority from first to last, it showsmany aspects of Mr. Ratmansky:satirist, storyteller, dramatist, poet. I’m impatient to see it again, but a large part of the delight it affords on first viewing lies in not knowing what’s going to happen.
This work (to which critics were first admitted on Thursday) isn’t a “Nutcracker” that leads us back to the original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though it takes a few unusual points from there. Instead its basic structure is that of numerous Russian “Nutcrackers” since the Stalinist era: little Clara (the Russians usually call her Masha) no sooner sees the Nutcracker, once he’s transformed into a Prince, than they fall in love-love-love and at once turn into adults. Never mind going to meet any Sugar Plum Fairy — instead they get to dance the music of her pas de deux themselves.
But Mr. Ratmansky takes that formula, tweaks it and makes it new. When his boy (transformed) and girl meet, they’re kindred spirits but from different worlds. They suddenly become doubled — they acquire mature alter egos, a twist that transforms the ballet’s sense of time and space. They’re like the hero and heroine of Philip Pullman’s superlative trilogy, “His Dark Materials” — young lovers from parallel universes.
At first it seems marvelous that we see the grown-ups they’ll become, but then Mr. Ratmansky takes us one step further and shows us how those adults still feel like the children they were. Their grand pas de deux is alternately formal and informal: they show the big, classically perfect dance shapes, arcs, gestures and steps that reveal their ideal qualities, but they also just can’t help expressing their own lesser-mortal amazement about this.
The main story is still focused on their younger selves. Mr. Ratmansky has animated the entire company. (I don’t enjoy a few supporting performances, but at every moment they’re precisely considered.) Yet amid several superb interpretations on Thursday, none surpassed those of the two central children. Young Catherine Hurlin’s partly angry, partly vulnerable, never picture-perfect Clara exemplifies the individuality of Mr. Ratmansky’s approach. Tyler Maloney as her Nutcracker Boy has the same courage and the same vulnerability. Mr. Ratmansky asks him to sustain one particular pose — arms open, face upturned, not facing the audience but on a diagonal — that suggests his mix of astonishment and gratitude, and it strikes home as something unusual in ballet, a private moment that is emotionally huge but not being sold to the public.
When these two children find themselves in the Land of Snow, it’s not a winter wonderland for them — it’s an adventure, now frightening, now freezing. The poetry of Mr. Ratmansky’s vision here is very striking: no Snowflakes were ever more ambiguous, and they have been given pouncing jumps, spinning arcs, and insistent gestures that make us feel we’re in the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”
Later this young heroine and hero do meet a Sugar Plum Fairy — in this case, an exotically regal, nondancing one. It’s thanks to her presentation that suddenly they have another moment out of time and see their adult selves united in love and, finally, marriage.
As the older Clara and Nutcracker, Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg gave performances on Thursday that count immediately among the high-water marks of their already distinguished careers. Mr. Ratmansky has given them roles that wonderfully yoke their dual commitment to ballet classicism and to dramatic sincerity. There are spectacular throws and catches in the pas de deux, and yet acrobatics aren’t the point here; what you think about is the spontaneity of love’s first excitement.
Mr. Hallberg’s solo starts with a slow fall sideways that’s exactly what nobody expects to see in a ballet, but this quirky impetus becomes the humanizing force within the beautifully bobbing series of jumps that follow. Just as Ms. Murphy’s Clara finishes the main part of her solo (one of the blander passages of the work, admittedly), she goes right off into the wings, then sticks her head out as if sharing a joke with us. She pops straight back on and tears up the stage in a circuit of jumps and turns in which her own terrific academic clarity and fullness become charged with renewed rapture.
Mr. Hallberg starts the coda with a solo of extraordinarily shimmering delicacy, building up to a more conventional display of heroic jumps around the stage (danced with unconventional finesse). Yet not long after, within the very same number, both he and Ms. Murphy, amid a busy phrase, suddenly stand on flat feet and reel a little — as if unable to believe what’s happening to them. These dances keep saying both, “This is perfect,” and, “We can’t believe this is happening”; you feel how full their hearts are.
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