Photo Credit: Mark Frohna
Some performances are inspired. Maybe Milwaukee Ballet’s 50th anniversary and the company’s move to its new landmark home in the Third Ward brought fresh focus to The Nutcracker this year. Maybe the energy of an unusually large number of first-time performers and the excitement of newer company members in bigger roles helped. Certainly the freedom given to long-standing company members to make every use of the knowledge they’ve acquired through years of performing characters and choreography they’ve helped to define was another reason. Certainly the fact that conductor Pasquale Laurino has made this greatest of all ballet scores part of his DNA—as evidenced by the sublime performances of the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra and the Milwaukee Children’s Choir—helped make this year’s opening matinee the most moving, for me, of the many iterations of Michael Pink’s holiday masterpiece that I’ve been honored to review.
The storytelling was crystal clear. Every moment led to the next as in an actual dream. Maybe the fact that Pink himself played the toymaker, Drosselmeyer, for one performance last year re-inspired his choreographic imagination. Perhaps also contributing was the fact that Patrick Howell, who danced Drosselmeyer so beautifully in this year’s opening, is a new first-time father. In any case, Drosselmeyer was present and alive in this performance as never before, holding the show in his hands like a true magician.
Davit Hovhannisyan, the other longtime company dancer who, like Howell, has given audiences so much pleasure for many years, was at his most graceful, buoyant and musically sensitive. As always, his partner, Marize Fumero, executed every impossible balance, lift and leg extension with profound composure, as if she were the movement. Rising stars Barry Molina and Alana Griffith were fiery, funny and virtuosic in turn. Other standouts were Lizzie Tripp and Ransom Wilkes-Davis as Arabian Dolls; Itzel Hernandez as the Shepherdess; Parker Brasser-Vos, Harold Cueto and Benjamin Simoens as the Jacks; and Annia Hidalgo’s joyous, spinning Snow Queen. They’ll trade roles with others as the run proceeds.
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It’s a tale of giving gifts to open up imaginations. Watching all the many child performers, I imagined how dancing to Peter Tchaikovsky played live would change their lives. Parents, bring your children. When they encounter The Nutcracker in later years, it may bring them to their deepest selves, as this did for me. It’s a place beyond words. It’s why music and dance exist.
Through Dec. 26 at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, 929 N. Water St.
