Reviewed by Joel Beers
Long Beach Ballet at the Terrace Theatre, Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center
Through. December 21
RECOMMENDED
Hold on to your hats, your handbags and your latest plush prize wrestled from a claw machine marathon, because you’re about to read the most enthusiastic endorsement a theater critic can give: I’m buying tickets the next time that Long Beach Ballet stages The Nutcracker.
This is, hands down — and ballet flats up — the most over-the-top, jaw-dropping, stage-devouring production I’ve ever seen, not just of The Nutcracker but of anything.
I don’t know how Nutcracker purists (if there is any such thing) or diehard aficionados view this David Wilcox–conceived and directed spectacle which, if it doesn’t stand alone, stands in rarefied company. According to the official press release, it has dazzled more than 400,000 people in Long Beach and over a million around the world since its debut 43 years ago.
Nor do I know how many other productions boast an aerial sleigh, a live horse onstage, pyrotechnic-spewing cannons, stage illusions that make cast members vanish and reappear, some 200 dancers, marching soldiers and mice, Christmas trees that start enormous and grow even larger, and a something called Mother Ginger so vast in her hoop-skirt costume that she seems to swallow the stage, with some things called Polichinelles popping out from underneath.
I’m not sure what these are because my frame of reference for ballet and The Nutcracker is limited, to say the least: a vaguely remembered Orange County Performing Arts Center production from decades ago, plus the score’s endless reinventions in commercials and films like Fantasia and Home Alone, and as the cinematic shorthand for motion, mischief and pure holiday chaos. Hell, even my Tchaikovsky touchstone is less classical music than the shout-out in the Beatles cover of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven.
But I do know this: this production, both for its big and bold spectacle and the entrancing movement of human bodies onstage in tandem with a full symphony orchestra (which, again according to the press release, is one of the rare ensembles to include two harps, making this one of the few to sound like the composer intended) is joyful, exuberant, beautiful and astonishing.
The big set pieces and flourishes, courtesy of former Disney designers Elliot Hessayon and Scott Schaffer (scenery), Adrian Clark (costumes), and Franz Harary (illusions and special effects), generate a lot of the buzz, and the seemingly endless battalion of child performers supplies the mass, but the heart of this production lies in in the solo performances. It’s the grace and fluidity of the featured dances that stay with you.
Even choosing performers who stand out can be tricky. For instance, this past weekend, Derek Drilon of the Joffrey Ballet performed as the Prince along with Megan Wilcox of SemperOper Ballett and California Ballet as the Sugar Plum Fairy — but next weekend those roles will be performed by Vitor Luiz, former principal dancer of the San Francisco Ballet, and Tara Ghassemieh, a renowned Iranian-American principal ballerina..
Suffice it to say that all the featured dancers are extraordinarily talented, making what must be incredibly difficult physical feats and intense mental concentration seem effortless.
But there is one more element to this production that isn’t seen onstage or heard emanating from the pit — and it might be the most important element of all: the undeniable electricity in the crowd and its intense attachment to what unfolds onstage. There wasn’t an empty seat in the 3,000-capacity Terrace Theater at the opening Sunday matinee. Sellouts in a theater are always special, but many it can seem as if people are there because they’re supposed to be. There’s a big star onstage, or the play is an event, for whatever reason.
While there are ballet stars on this stage and this Nutcracker is an event, but the enthusiasm and love for this production among the audience is natural and infectious. Yes, it’s theatrical and filled with spectacle, but it’s also weirdly intimate. It’s like a huge extended holiday gathering one where, for a couple of hours, the theater truly feels like home.
Terrace Theater, Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Sat, 2 pm & 7:30 pm, Sun., 2 pm. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes with a long intermission. https://longbeachnutcracker.com/
