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Now that we’ve finally put away the holiday decorations and the first season of PNB’s spanking new custom-made production of The Nutcracker has wrapped, we reflect on the changing of the guards of this cherished local holiday tradition—and what it means when a local arts group commissions a piece.

For a city with a population notorious for having a lack of traditional religious affiliations, one-of-a-kind holiday traditions sure run deep in Seattle. At various points in time we have been home to Book-It’s line-by-line reenactment of the Christmas Pageant scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany; the Total Experience Gospel Choir’s Black Nativity; Rich Gray’s Forbidden Xmas musical review…and we continue to enjoy Argosy Cruise’s Christmas Ships, Seattle Men’s Chorus funny and moving choral performances and more. And of course, there are the many iterations of The Christmas Carol and The Nutcracker.

There are countless productions of these chestnuts in the Puget Sound and around the country, but truly nothing like Pacific Northwest Ballet’s (PNB) version of the Nutcracker with sets and costumes by Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are and choreography by longtime former PNB artistic director Kent Stowell. I have seen the ballet in several cities across the country and though it’s always pleasant and familiar, I didn’t love it until I saw this version (full disclosure: most years I attended the show via press tickets provided by the Pacific Northwest Ballet).

Like any good Gen Xer who grew up in the ’70s, I read Sendak’s children’s books (Not just Wild Things, but his slightly weirder and darker tales, such as the collection in the Nutshell Library and In the Night Kitchen). When I first saw the show in 1998 or 1999, I couldn’t believe we had something so incredible all our own. The production is so special, the 1986 movie version is still played on TV during the holidays.

Appropriately, I was the among the crushed when PNB announced in 2014 that they’d be retiring this version, replacing it with the show that just closed in late December, with all-new sets and costumes by Ian Falconer, author/illustrator of Olivia The Pig children’s book series, and choreography by famed New York City Ballet artistic director George Balanchine.

But, hey, Olivia’s a fun pig, and Falconer’s illustrations—muted, stark, modern and traditional at once—made me curious how it would all shape up, so I got on board. As we toured PNB’s Fremont production facility and the costume shop in preparation for our sneak preview story on the new production in last November’s issue, and oohed and ahhed over peeks at the expanding tree, the getaway walnut boat, the snowflakes, and the peacock costume, I couldn’t help wonder how Seattle would receive the new show. You might have heard: We can be a bit resistant to change.

The show’s first season closed on December 28. Reactions were mixed, and we’re still discussing it. One of our editors who is a lifelong Seattleite called it “Nutcracker light.” Our digital editor loved it. Seattle magazine arts editor Jim Demetre, who brings his vast knowledge to his writing, offers insight to the storytelling, staging and history of this ballet most people going to see this holiday show for fun might not even think about.

One thing was clear, and especially tough to avoid at our office since we produce a magazine for people who are living in this great city we love to call home, not just those passing through: If you’ve seen the Stowell/Sendak (SS) version, it is impossible not to compare the two.

Here’s my take (and, to be clear, I fall in the arts appreciator category rather than arts critic—see Jim’s piece below for that): The Balanchine/Falconer (BF) version was delightful and spectacular, in its own way. The opening scrim was splashed with popular Falconer colors of turquoise and bright red, which may become your new favorite modern color combination for the holidays. Sets—though very stately—seemed lighter and brighter than the muted pastel Stowell/Sendak (SS) version, but less imaginative and fanciful. Though I preferred the dreamlike interpretation of the story in the SS version, the BF interpretation moved along faster and I didn’t mind that the slightly creepy Herr Drosselmeyer (Clara’s godfather) was more approachable and friendly in the BF version. I especially appreciated the use of technology in the staging, too—something I’ve wondered how local theaters might use ever since theatrical projections started becoming popular at events such as Olympics Opening ceremonies. From the flames in the fireplaces to the opening video of a birds-eye-view over the river and through the woods to the doorstep of the house where all the action takes place, there were some really cool touches. And birch trees—a big part of the set in the snow scenes, though not exactly the first tree I’d associate with the Pacific Northwest—are my new favorites.

When people ask me whether I’d recommend the show, I say yes—with an asterisk. If you are a fan of the SS production for its Sendakian sets and costumes and semi-dark take on the story and characters, then the new show will feel like someone else’s Nutcracker. There is an overriding East Coast feel and look to this production, evident in details such as silhouette portraits hanging on the walls of the home and the older, white, black-tie-clad theater patrons painted in the “box seats” flanking the stage (with Olivia the Pig looking on). I found it interesting that arts patrons were represented solely as this single demographic, but that is a discussion for another time. This East Coast sensibility certainly makes sense given the much-reported personal connection PNB artistic director Peter Boal and costume/set designer Ian Falconer (both from the East Coast) have with this classic. And though it’s obviously part of the choreography licensing agreement, I find it so interesting this is billed as “Balanchine’s Nutcracker” given that the new sets and costumes are what steal the show. This production feels like Boal and Falconer’s Nutcracker all the way.

After the show’s closing, Gary Tucker, PNB’s public relations spokesperson, told me in an email that ticket sales were “terrific, although nothing close to last year’s sales, which were out-of-the-ordinary extraordinary, being the last year of the Stowell/Sendak version.” He added that the true test will come next year when they can get an accurate read on attendance.

Perhaps what I’m most fascinated with, though, is something I’ve been noodling over since I saw the show. When a major arts organization has the resources and an opportunity to reinvent a classic and make it uniquely theirs, how localized are they obligated to get? And what should that localization look like? Must it hit people over the head with clichés of pine trees, coffee and rain? (Please, no.) It’s not like this is one of those incubator shows work-shopped locally at the 5th Avenue Theatre or Intiman that then heads to Broadway and nobody really knows (or cares) where it originated. The Sendak/Stowell production beautifully struck that quirky, weird Seattle chord without going into cliché Seattle territory. But now that Seattle is in the midst of another wave of newcomers from all points of the globe for whom this show is just a pretty production, does that matter?

The new show is beautiful. It’s totally worth going to see. I’ll be back. But I’ll never stop missing those wild things. —Rachel Hart

The Nutcracker Review

By Jim Demetre

This past holiday season marked the debut of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new production of The Nutcracker, the classic holiday program expected to draw large audiences each year and give students at the company’s school their first opportunity to dance on a professional stage.

Last year, the company announced that they would be retiring the Nutcracker which had been performed at McCaw Hall (known previously as the Seattle Opera House) for the last 31 years. This production, created by PNB Founding Artistic Director Kent Stowell and celebrated illustrator and children’s book author Maurice Sendak, would be replaced by a new version of George Balanchine’s venerable and oft-staged 1954 New York City Ballet production. It would be designed by New Yorker illustrator and Olivia the Pig author Ian Falconer.

It is perfectly reasonable for a ballet company to want to change a production with so many shows each year after three long decades. And with artistic director Peter Boal at the helm for nearly 10 years, he was certainly entitled to put his own stamp on things. But what are we to make of his new production and what does it say about his direction of the company?

According to accounts in the press and in the organization’s own publicity, Boal’s decision is largely a personal and sentimental one. In the show’s program, we are treated to pictures of an adorable, costumed 10 year-old Boal in a 1970s New York City Ballet production of Balanchine’s Nutcracker. As we are all now aware, this inspired boy would later rise to fame as a principal dancer in the late Balanchine’s own company before taking over PNB.    

Boal’s decade at PNB is considered by most to be a great success. He has maintained the company’s Balanchine heritage by continuing to stage impressive productions of the master’s works. At the same time, he has added a wide range of contemporary and classic modern choreography to the repertoire and broadened the company’s appeal.

In the case of the Nutcracker, Boal has chosen to commit to the former course of action when the latter might have provided better results. This new rendition of Balanchine’s Nutcracker feels strangely muted and disappointingly anachronistic. Seeing it one week after its opening, the freshly-minted production already appeared tired and a relic of another era.

George Balanchine may be the greatest and most influential ballet choreographer of the 20th Century, but his Nutcracker appears decidedly slight today. One senses it was created to please audiences larger and less discriminating than those who attended performances of his more ground-breaking works. What it was clearly not created to do is tell a compelling story or impart an important message.

The Stowell/Sendak Nutcracker has its detractors and there were many who no doubt grew weary of seeing it on stage year after year. I wish to bring it up not to challenge the wisdom of retiring it, but rather to suggest how it succeeded in ways the Balanchine Nutcracker—both old and new—does not.

Stowell and Sendak re-examined Hoffmann’s largely incomprehensible story and translated into a new, full length ballet. Balanchine, for all of his genius, neglected to engage its deeper meanings, choosing instead to set a series of mostly unconnected dances to Tchaikovsky’s vibrant score. The lack of an underlying theme and narrative arc leave the dance segments disjointed with little momentum propelling them forward.

Sendak was such a talented and original visual artist it is easy to forget his abilities as a storyteller. The Nutcracker he devised with Stowell is a great example of his ability to embrace a tale’s most relevant theme and build a compelling structure around it. The ballet the two men created is about a girl who awakens to the idea of her womanhood, but it is also about the transformative power of art. The magic that brings the toy nutcracker to life in the form of a handsome prince also turns Clara into a grown woman for the duration of the second act. This act of imagining has been triggered by the painted, wooden gift from her artist/inventor uncle, Herr Drosselmeyer.

A narrative ballet is most successful when rooted in myth or fairy tale, and Stowell and Sendak found these qualities in the story. In their hands, it became a female counterpart to Swan Lake, arguably the greatest ballet of them all and a quintessential male coming of age tale. After Clara and the prince dance their final, emotionally-charged pas de deux at the Pasha’s court, the prince sails off alone, the Pasha (an invention of Sendak) reveals himself to be Drosselmeier, and Clara, once again a girl, lies asleep in her bedroom. Drosselmeier, like Swan Lake’s sorcerer Rothbart, is a conjurer of a romantic illusion that instills itself in the mind of the young protagonist.

In Balanchine’s Nutcracker, Clara does not grow up but visits a place called The Land of the Sweets with Drosselmeier’s young nephew, who literally emerges from inside the Nutcracker costume. None of the action in Act 2 is about Clara, who lingers on stage only as a passive observer. The grande pas de deux, for example, —danced here by the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier—has none of the pathos or meaning it does in the Stowell/Sendak version.

The PNB’s update of this 1954 ballet is a superficial one. Falconer’s design for the production is spare, flat and without much expressiveness, which I suspect was Boal’s (and the Balanchine trust’s) intent. The Stahlbaum’s cream and blue interiors are refined, elegant and unobtrusive, but in the Land of the Sweets, where Falconer must venture beyond his usual cool palette of powder blue, graphite and primary red, he appears out of his depth. The two-dimensional, molded jello capitals and swirling, candy cane columns look more like sets from a community theater than a great ballet company. More significantly, the set changes at the end of Act 1 do not establish careful transitions between time or location and the costumes impede the visual impact of the dances throughout. The skirts of the waltzing Snowflakes and Flowers, for instance, had so many layers of piled fabric they appeared to flop rather than twirl with the dancer’s turns and pirouettes.

There are many reasons why a major ballet company might decide to replace a 30 year-old Nutcracker with something new and more befitting its time. Audience members had expressed reservations in recent years about the brown-face and yellow-face depictions of the Dervishes and Chinese dancers in Stowell/Sendak Nutcracker’s divertissements. Their presence had become increasingly awkward as the racial mix of the company’s dancers and the PNB School’s students became more diverse. Although the Dervishes revert to Balanchine’s old Candy Canes in this production, the Chinese stereotype remains, less self-consciously, as Mr. B’s Chinese Tea.

After seeing PNB’s new production, Boal’s decision to go back another 30 years and select its predecessor seems like an idea clouded by his own nostalgia. This would have been a fantastic opportunity for the company to commission a living choreographer to create an entirely new and original Nutcracker and find a bold visual artist to design it. Perhaps together they would have found new meaning in an old but very open-ended story. Regardless of what you think of their work, Kent Stowell and Maurice Sendak once proved that this could be done here, and it could have happened again.

Seattle is, for better or worse, a city that prides itself on innovation and iconoclasm. As an artist friend said to me disheartenedly after the show, “In Seattle, we don’t look backwards into the past or towards New York City for inspiration. That’s just not who we are.”