‘Say Goodbye to Nutcracker’?

Milwaukee Ballet gives the old costumes a final spin before next year’s revamp

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Milwaukee Ballet’s current production of The Nutcracker was conceived and choreographed by Michael Pink in his first year here as artistic director, using the sets and costumes of his predecessor’s version. Twenty years later, that production can be described as a really interesting 20-year-old dressed in badly worn-out hand-me-downs. To push the metaphor, it’s a pregnant 20-year-old. An all-new Nutcracker somehow lives in it, set to arrive in 2023.

Perhaps that’s why Pink decided I should talk with dancer Marie Harrison-Collins who was, in fact, literally pregnant last season while dancing her first Nutcracker star turn. She played Marie, who journeys with her boyfriend and younger siblings to the Tchaikovsky-colored Land of Sweets and Imagination. Now, as Lucille Elizabeth’s mom, she’ll reprise that role in the production Pink refers to as “Say Goodbye to Nutcracker.”

“I was in my second trimester and apparently you have extra hormones,” Harrison-Collins tells me when I ask how it was to dance pregnant. “I had way more energy than usual, so it actually worked better. It’s not an easy ballet, but stamina-wise it wasn’t bad. Davit (Hovhannisyan) had partnered pregnant people before, so I felt 100 percent confident with him. We had to change one lift so he wouldn’t catch me on my stomach.”

After that, she stopped performing but attended daily dance classes until a week before her baby’s birth. Four weeks later, she returned to the classes to get back in shape. She’d bring the baby along. Then this fall, cast as the Black Swan in Swan Lake and with Lucille happily in daycare, she found that “the hardest part was staying in point shoes for eight hours a day. There’s no way to prepare for that!”

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“I want to show the world that your career as a dancer isn’t over when you have a baby,” she says with passion. “It’s the exact opposite. When I didn’t have a baby, I’d stress over work. Now if a bad day happens, I get to go home to my baby and nothing else matters. It also makes you want to do better.”

About The Nutcracker, she says “Michael’s is my favorite that I’ve ever seen because it tells a story. It’s not just random acts. I can portray Marie throughout the whole ballet. That’s what’s so fun.”

Multiple Roles

Each company dancer learns multiple roles in the show and plays them in different performances. Harrison-Collins’ twin sister, Elizabeth Harrison, plays the younger sister Clara but the twins have yet to play sisters onstage. “That’s my dream,” says Harrison-Collins.

She sometimes plays the Snow Queen, or a member of the corps of Snowflakes. She deems the latter “the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You’re jumping up, you’re on the floor, you’re up, you’re down. As the Queen, I get to rest a bit.”

She sometimes plays the Shepherdess with three goofy Geese, or a waltzing Flower, or the female Arabian Dancer. “I love all my roles,” she says. “But what I enjoy so much about The Nutcracker is that we know it so well, so we can add our own nuances and think of new ways to portray our characters every night. You’re not even thinking about the steps, you’re thinking of new ways to make it more interesting and fun.”

This season will be the last chance to enjoy those goofy Geese. Their costumes and number belong to the show Pink inherited. He has other plans now for that part of Tchaikovsky’s score.

I ask him what it’s like to stage his old version one last time. “It’s always good, isn’t it, to reaffirm what it is about this show that really means a lot,” he answers.

He promises to keep the swoon-worthy “Snow Pas de Deux” of Act One and all the clown antics intact. “I’m going to keep as much of the original choreography that works and that I feel proud of,” he says. “If I can’t find a way to rethink it, why change it? I think this might be the only version in existence where there are four principal characters. So that very much stays in the new version, which I’m hoping will again become part of a tradition, and every year our audience will go: Oh good! They’re all there!”

“And I’m very proud of the family party scene with so many people onstage. It engages audiences every year. I think people feel like they’re at the party. It’s the same party as before but, as with all parties, there are different dynamics, so they’re observing things they didn’t see last year. I think our company loves performing that scene because it’s become a rite of passage for each new dancer who joins the company. It’s an eye-opener for what liberties you can take on stage to create an incredible scene.”

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Performances are Dec. 10-24 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center. Visit milwaukeeballet.org or call 414-902-2103.