Last night in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Ballet (SFB) began its seasonal offering with the first of 33 performances of Helgi Tomasson’s choreography for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1892 score for The Nutcracker. I have to confess that, for all of the time I have been living in the Bay Area, this was my “first contact” with this SFB production. Those following this site and my earlier articles for Examiner.com probably know that I had other priorities in the past; but I have been gradually allowing myself to be drawn back to ballet, the genre in which I first exercised my writing chops.
Tomasson clearly wanted to make a version of The Nutcracker with San Francisco in mind. As a result, he rejected the traditional setting with its origins in the narrative as expressed in one of the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, reworking a fresh narrative set in San Francisco in 1915 during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The opening image of a street scene mimed during Tchaikovsky’s overture captured the past in a setting still recognizable in the present, although one has to wonder whether any of those row houses really had an “entertainment space” as large as the setting for most of the ballet’s first act. Nevertheless, this is a fairy tale, rather than a historical account; so it deserves all the respect of the willing suspension of disbelief!
Far more important is how Tomasson’s interpretation made for the generous commingling the students of the of the SFB School with the professional members of the company itself. Given the diversity of characters in Tomasson’s narrative, including the “entertainments” of the second act divertissement, the production allows opportunities ranging from character performances by seasoned professionals all the way down to the youngest pupils at the School. The result is a consistently engaging interleaving of personalities, each drawing upon the breadth of Tomasson’s staging to leave a memorable stamp on the memory of the attentive viewer.
Tiit Helimets in the role of Drosselmeyer (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of SFB)
It would not be fair to single out any of the dancers by name, since casting for the major solo roles rotates from one performance to the next. Nevertheless, one can definitely cite the contribution of Tiit Helimets as Uncle Drosselmeyer, which offers one of the richest developments of that character that I have seen in my own personal history of Nutcracker experiences. It is also worth noting the contribution of the orchestra to the overall experience. In last night’s performance conducted by Martin West, the attentive listener could detect any number of shadings of subtle sonorities to be gleaned from Tchaikovsky’s score, many of which never seem to emerge from any of the recordings of this familiar music.
Things definitely got off to a good start last night, and I sincerely hope that this engaging interpretation of the choreography will hold its own all the way through to the final performance on the afternoon of December 27.
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