Madison Ballet’s artistic director and its marketing director need to start talking to each other. The ballet’s advertising tagline for the 2003-2004 season is, “It’s different here,” and the ballet’s promotional materials promise an experience that is not, “pink, mamby-pamby, snobby [and] oh-so-polite.”
As an advertising strategy, selling Madison Ballet as the anti-ballet ballet may be an effective means for getting new audiences in the seats. Unfortunately, the advertising failed to match what was actually on stage in this year’s “Nutcracker,” which was performed Dec. 12-21 at the Civic Center’s Oscar Mayer Theatre. “Nutcracker” was the first of Madison Ballet’s two productions this season. The second is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” March 19-20.
Far from being “different,” Madison Ballet’s “Nutcracker” was an utterly conventional production of what is already the most conventional of ballets.
All of the hackneyed features found in hundreds of other “Nutcrackers” were there: the growing Christmas tree, Drosselmeyer’s magic tricks, the toy soldiers’ exploding cannon, and Mother Ginger on stilts with young children hiding beneath her giant skirts. Not a single aspect of the production was in any way “different” from the standard-issue holiday-season “Nutcracker.” That’s not to say that any of these features were done poorly — merely that they have been done so many times before as to lose any sense of discovery or surprise.
Act One was dominated by the Christmas party at the Stahlbaums’ house. “A cast of thousands” crowded the stage. Unfortunately for those interested in watching actual ballet, virtually none of the partygoers were played by dancers. Instead they were played by either adult non-dancers or young children from local ballet schools. Between the grand processions of the partygoers on and off the stage and Drosselmeyer’s tricks, there were fewer than 15 minutes of actual ballet in the 40 minutes of Act One. The overall effect was reminiscent of a small-town ballet-class recital, with the goal apparently being to get as many people up on the stage as possible, whether or not any of them could actually dance.
Act Two, Clara’s dream-journey to the Land of Sweets, showed a definite improvement over Act One. The crowd of extras from Act One disappeared, and the focus shifted to the dancers who entertained Clara on her journey.
Particularly memorable were the divertissements on a national theme — Spanish, Arabian, Chinese and Russian. Greta Jones (in the Dec. 21 performance) performed a splendid solo during the Arabian divertissement.
She danced en pointe, but did so with an air of sinuous exoticism that evoked a barefoot belly dancer. The ballet concluded with a well-executed pas de deux performed by Christina Fagundes and Ben Huys. Madison Ballet does not have a resident professional company. Instead, it relied on Madison-area ballet-school students for the children’s and corps de ballet roles, while guest artists filled the principal adult roles.
The guest artists were drawn from around the nation, but two local performers were worthy of note: UW sophomore Libby Olien as an Arabian soloist and a Merliton soloist and veteran Madison actress Patricia Whitely as the maid.
Whitely is not a ballet dancer, but she turned in a fine performance as a character actor. Particularly entertaining was a vignette where the guests arriving at the party deposited their overcoats with her until she tottered under their weight.
One wishes that Madison Ballet had emulated what its counterpart in Milwaukee did with the “Nutcracker” this year. The Milwaukee Ballet staged a newly choreographed “Nutcracker” in which the role of Clara, which is typically played by a child, was instead danced by an adult. What’s more, in the Milwaukee Ballet’s version, Clara was joined on her trip to the Land of Sweets by her sister Marie, her brother Fritz and Drosselmeyer’s nephew Karl. By casting adults in these roles and sending all of them to the Land of Sweets, the Milwaukee Ballet was able to circumvent the problem with casting a child as Clara, which is that the putative main character is too young to dance en pointe and is therefore relegated to a spectator role through most of Act Two.
Whether the Milwaukee Ballet’s approach worked can be debated, but the point is that the Milwaukee Ballet maintained the traditional elements of “The Nutcracker” while experimenting with an original variation. In other words, they produced something “different” — and that’s something that Madison Ballet, its advertising hype notwithstanding, failed to do with its by-the-numbers production.
