Once again, last night marked the first of 31 performances of Helgi Tomasson’s choreography for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1892 score for The Nutcracker by San Francisco Ballet. There will be two performances every day, with the exception of last night’s opening performance and no performances at all on Mondays (December 18 and 25). This requires two conductors and multiple casting for the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Grand Pas de Deux near the end of the second act, and the Queen and King of the Snow in the first act. No casting information is provided in the program book, nor is there an inserted sheet to compensate for the rich diversity. There are only signs in the lobby providing the details, not the best approach to take for those with short memories!
In that respect, most of what I can say about this production was already said at the beginning of last year’s December. This has become an “old reliable” seasonal tradition, and there was a fair amount of evidence that much of the audience was treating it that way. However, because the narrative is so familiar, there tended to be a prevailing sense of anonymity where the dancers were concerned, not only in the corps performances but also in the individual roles of the narrative’s characters. The one exception may be all the participating students from the SFB School, who have not (yet?) settled into the uniformity of the groups they are depicting.
However, if the performances on stage were not as compelling as they could have been, conductor Martin West’s account of Tchaikovsky’s music was consistently “on the money” from start to finish, often summoning Tchaikovsky’s instrumentations to highlight specific character traits.
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