They’re back!

The Stahlbaum family and their multi-generational guests at a Christmas Eve party — mechanical toys that come to life, a wounded Nutcracker, battling mice, waltzing snowflakes, ditto flowers, and multiple varieties of sweets, dancing away in Oregon Ballet Theatre’s twenty-second run of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®.  

The holiday perennial opened last Friday night, Dec. 5, at Keller Auditorium and closes with a matinee on Christmas Eve. I attended last Saturday evening’s performance, because I particularly wanted to see Brian Simcoe, who retires at the end of the season after 22 years with OBT, dance the Cavalier in the second act Grand Pas de Deux, a role he continues to define.

Partnering newcomer Swane Messaoudi, whose tall, long-legged body is a physical match for his, Simcoe performed his variation with his customary elegance and restraint, reserving the pyrotechnics for the coda. Messaoudi, who trained in her native France and with San Francisco Ballet, danced with technical skill and confidence, but could improve on how she interacts with the children in the cast, particularly the gliding small angels, and the Little Prince and Princess (Drosselmeier’s nephew and Marie in the first act). No one, in my long experience of watching a number of versions of The Nutcracker, did this better than the late Elena Carter Richardson.

Charlotte Zogas, as Marie Stahlbaum — the little girl whose Christmas Eve dream of a growing Christmas tree, toy soldiers battling mice, and travels to the Kingdom of the Sweets, where she’s treated like a little princess — defined this role as fully as Simcoe does the Cavalier. Her palpable delight in dancing itself; her musicality; the way she uses her face to convey a wide range of emotions from Christmas Eve excitement to sadness for her broken nutcracker, her gift from her godfather, Herr Drosselmeier; her joyous jump onto the spinning bed that carries her and the Nutcracker Prince to the Land of the Sweets —  all signify that this 11-year-old OBT School student is headed, if she wants it, for a major career. 

According to Katarina Svetlova, OBT School director, the Portland-born Zogas asked for ballet lessons when she was three, after seeing a performance of The Nutcracker. When she was eight, she became a serious student at OBT’s School, absorbing the classical technique and clearly using it to express her own feelings. Again, according to Svetlova, Zogas’ favorite parts to rehearse are the party scene and the solo that precedes the battle between the rats and toy soldiers, when late at night Marie returns to the empty parlor in search of her nutcracker. That love of rehearsing certainly paid off at Saturday evening’s performance.

While some of the dancing seemed muted (the Snowflakes spun rather cautiously through the falling artificial snow) “Hot Chocolate,” led by the musically stamping Leigh Goldberger and Benjamin Simoens, was performed with the passionate energy we associate with Spanish dance. 

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Eva Burton’s witty, accented performance of the solo formerly known as “Coffee,” which Balanchine in his second iteration of The Nutcracker turned into a belly dance performed in pointe shoes, is now retitled “Turkish Delight.” While the choreography remains the same, a new costume, designed last year by Lisa Kipp, removes the sexual suggestiveness. 

The costume includes a small ruffled bustle, and a headdress that looks more Russian than Turkish, but all of these second-act “national” dances are, after all, the very Russian Tchaikovsky’s musical take on the national dances of his time. Changing the title and costumes of the cloyingly cute (and painfully racist) “Tea” variation to “White Rabbit” (evidently the name of a favorite Russian confection) was very much needed, although I confess I momentarily expected to see Wonderland’s Alice as part of the trio.

The Nutcracker’s second act contains some fiendishly difficult variations, among them Dew Drop, which Saturday night was performed with crystalline clarity and insouciant ease by Zuzu Metzler. Candy Cane (a highly acrobatic role that Balanchine performed when he was a student at the Mariinsky Academy in pre-revolutionary Russia) is another. Company artist Cyrus Shaskan elicited loud cheers from the audience, as, wielding his hoop and jumping through it with the elegance of a circus poodle, he traveled — and how! — across the stage.

As did Phillip Wells-Benitez as Mother Ginger, whose mugging and preening and comic timing easily matched that of Portland drag queen Poison Waters, who will appear in the role a number of times before this Nutcracker run concludes on December 24.  Her flock of Polichinelles (aka little ones from OBT’s School) emerged from under her tent of a skirt, tumbling and scampering, eluding her grasp, thoroughly and delightfully in the moment.

The OBT Orchestra, which will accompany all but three of these Nutcracker performances and which was conducted by Enrique Carreon-Robledo, OBT’s new music director, played well former OBT music director Niel de Ponte’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s score. One of those performances, at 7:30 p.m. December 22, is geared toward audience members with “sensory processing challenges … [and] features a relaxed environment, modified sound and lighting, and entry/exit privileges.”  

I have long been mystified by just why a 19^th century Russian ballet, with a libretto based on French writer Jules Perrault pere’s version of  German author E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, became so firmly embedded in American culture, and specifically our winter solstice celebrations. It occurred to me last Friday that one reason is that we are a nation of many cultures, the descendants of immigrants from all over the world as well as Indigenous peoples. Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers celebrate that multicultural society every time they set foot on the Keller stage.  Go and celebrate with them.

George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®

• Company: Oregon Ballet Theatre
• Where: Keller Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St., downtown Portland
• When: Through December 24
• Ticket and schedule information: Here