Nuts About the Ballet

We had a chance, in our encounter with Sinterklaas, to experience a Dutch Christmas tradition. How about a more familiar Christmas tradition, but with a Dutch twist?

It was a couple of months ago that Kayla, innocuously enough, suggested that we go to the ballet while we’re in Europe. The Dutch National Ballet has been performing for over 50 years in Amsterdam, and has been known to produce some of the most notable ballets. We’ve both been to plenty of theatre performances, but this was definitely a first for us—and so, we booked two tickets for “The Nutcracker” as a seasonal treat to end our trip.

“The Nutcracker” occupies a strange place in our cultural understanding, I think. Most people know something about it, but it’s a much smaller group who can actually tell you very much about it. There’s a Nutcracker, a Mouse King, something about a Sugar Plum Fairy, and snippets of songs that you recognize as much from shopping mall soundtracks as from an orchestra pit. Still, “The Nutcracker” premiered in St. Petersburg in 1892, and since that time has grown to become a Christmas tradition, especially in North America—so much so that contemporary ballets earn some 40% of their annual revenue on this one performance.

Tchaikovsky composed the iconic score to “The Nutcracker,” with the story (the libretto, if we’re using the correct lingo) adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” On a rainy Saturday night, we found ourselves at the sold-out Dutch National Opera & Ballet building, sipping a glass of wine before the bell signaled it was time to get seated.

When we entered the wide-open theatre, we found our plush seats on the first balcony, just to the side of the stage and looking down into the orchestra, already assembled before the curtains went up.

Naturally, once the lights went down, any recording was off-limits. Let me lead you through the ballet though—and don’t worry, there were plenty of young families present, so this isn’t some pretentious, high-culture assemblage. Truth be told, for our first ballet, it was very accessible and enjoyable.

The scene opens on an Amsterdam canal at night—for the first act especially, the sets were incredible, with one wall devoted to a canal house (the door constantly opening to let visitors in, just in time for a Christmas party) and the mid-section of the stage looking like a frozen canal, full of skaters. Productions of the ballet around the world vary on a lot of the details (like the setting), but the Dutch touch was nice.

The only thing wrong about it was how gracefully the characters shook the light snow off their umbrellas upon entering the house. When I left Uilenstede with an umbrella that night, the wind whipped it beyond recognition as soon as we got out of the building, and it ended up as a crumpled mass in the garbage dumpster—ah, the magic of theatre!

Characters’ names vary as well—not that it really matters, given that there’s no dialogue in the entire piece, just the music. Generally though, the main children are named Clara and Fritz, and their godfather is Drosselmeyer, a toy-maker and magician (when he entered the party, he causes his umbrella to levitate). The entire party dances, and then Sinterklaas enters, giving gifts to the children.

After he leaves, one child was forgotten—Drosselmeyer sets up a projector and plays a love story of a young soldier and his princess, and when it ends there’s a nutcracker on the stage. Clara has a perfect gift, until Fritz decides he wants to play with it too, and suddenly the nutcracker has no head.

For large chunks of the show, there were a lot of people on the stage, and each person had a very specific role in the ballet. That meant that there was a lot to pay attention to at any given point, and it’s especially difficult when there’s no dialogue to give you clues about what ought to be the focus—the stage directors compensated for this by using spotlights to subtly direct your attention to the right places. Everything was very symmetrical too, in terms of the men and women dancers and how the pairings were ordered on the stage, often interweaving in perfect order. Meanwhile, the conductor was positioned with a view of both the pit and the stage, so that the music meshed perfectly with what was happening on stage.

During the party scene, which ended when the clock struck midnight and Clara got out of bed, there was a see-through veil covering the front of the stage—this was suddenly lifted, perhaps signaling the shift into the dream world, populated by the creepy minions of the Mouse King (himself wearing a very creepy fuzzy white mask with beady red eyes), and real-life toy soldiers led by the Nutcracker. Clara and Fritz were replaced here by older performers, capable of some of the more difficult routines—that said, the ballet made definite use of very young performers, and these got a special applause at the end of the production.

The first act ended with a decisive swordfight between the Mouse King and the Nutrcracker, with the second act playing out on a considerably sparser stage. It felt like the narrative wasn’t there as much, but the dancing was just as impressive, and what the stage lacked it made up for in its costumes—we were now in the Land of Sweets, en route to the Sugar Plum Fairy, and different regions of the world (oriental performers in beautiful silk, heavily costumed Russians) represented different sweets (tea and candy canes, in those two examples).

We figured espressos and wine over the intermission must have motivated the audience—whereas we sat in attentive silence in the first act, there was applause after every musical number in this act. Especially once the Sugar Plum Fairy made her arrival, dancing to the most iconic number of the entire ballet (and probably the most iconic use of the celesta in the entire vast world of music composition).

The dream world of the Nutcracker and the Sugar Plum Fairy eventually subsided, bringing us back into Clara’s bedroom, where she and Fritz rush to the door to bid Drosselmeyer good night as he heads out into the Amsterdam night along the snowy canal.   

All in all, a pretty decent introduction to ballet—throughout the performance, we recognized more than a few of the pieces, and even if the story deviated a bit from the typical source material (no gingerbread characters to be seen), it still felt familiar. It still felt like a magically warm Christmasy embrace.

Against the backdrop of a December night in Amsterdam, we caught the train back to Uilenstede, literally with visions of Sugar Plums dancing in our heads.

Cheers,

rb