My Civic Center neighborhood turns into a Nutcracker factory during the month of December, with two performances a day of the Tchaikovsky ballet.
Every day dancers stream in and out of the San Francisco Ballet building on the corner of Fulton and Franklin...
...along with confused ballet patrons who don't realize that the show is actually across the street at the War Memorial Opera House.
We went to the Monday, December 23rd evening performance and had a wonderful time.
Though there were a few children in Monday's audience...
...who were being bought souvenir nutcrackers for Christmas...
...most of the crowd were adults...
...seemingly on date nights...
...with many dressed to the nines.
The cast changes for every performance and are only announced via signage in the lobby since injury, illness, and artistic discretion are all involved in who appears onstage in any particular performance.
In Swan Dive, a frank, funny and profane memoir or her career at New York City Ballet, the ballerina Georgina Pazcoguin wrote: "Although there are many who love dancing the Nutcracker, I have done it for the last twenty years because it's my job. The Nutcracker represents the tradition of paying your dues and proving how tough, how compliant, and how impervious to exhaustion you really are. Each new corps member and apprentice is expected to perform in every performance. Every. Single. One. The first Nutcracker season is the ultimate rite of passage for a new dancer, and only the strongest survive. Over the course of the season, the theater itself becomes a cesspool of injury and sickness. Our ties with friends and family are pushed to the limit--and our undying devotion to the ballet comes into question. This is why I affectiontely call it the NUTBUSTER."
I have no idea whether conditions are similar at the San Francisco ballet, but it is a grueling schedule and the peril of routine is ever-present. However, we got lucky on Monday night with a fabulous, committed cast and a great, enthusiastic audience. The guest conductor was Marc Taddei, above, and he led the SF Ballet Orchestra in a smooth, beautifully detailed rendering of Tchaikovsky's musical score.
The Helgi Tomasson production is 20 years old but it was looking spruced up a bit, along with some of the choreography, presumably by the new artistic director Tamara Rojo. What really elevated the performance beyond the ordinary was the dancing of Nikisha Fogo and Max Cauthorn, above. Fogo in particular was breathtaking and took the final Grand Pas de Deux to a zone of pure excitement.
You can catch one of the remaining eight performances from the 26th to 29th at the War Memorial Opera House, and they even seem to be offering a
Post-Christmas sale on tickets at their website here.
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