The Sedona Dance Academy gave its fourth annual “The Nutcracker” showcase to a standing room-only house at the Phillip England Center for the Performing Arts in Camp Verde on Saturday, Dec. 9.
SDA founder Jessica Phillips noted that the show has been in preparation since August, “which is actually quite quick for these kiddos to learn all this choreography.”
Rather than being a full performance of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet, the showcase used the framework of the original ballet as a loose structure for SDA students to show off their skills in a series of variations on the variations of the original.
For the party scene with which “The Nutcracker” opens, Phillips had adjusted the choreography to enable the participation of some of her youngest students, and kids putting on shows is, after all, a natural part of a holiday party.
The older kids in effect formed a mini-corps under the leadership of Fritz, played by Rupert Israel, and Clara, played by Sophie Walther. The children’s galop, on the other hand, was danced to excellent effect by the adults as a contradance. Lee Israel made an effective Drosselmeyer, full of tricks half in and half out of E.T.A. Hoffman’s century, with levitation and lambent lights. His three wooden wind-up girls tried to dance with Clara and Fritz, but the Stahlbaum kids decided to play hard to get. Rupert’s gleeful sauciness fit the Fritz role perfectly, especially in his overexcitement when Drosselmeyer finally gave him the sword and he got carried away.
The end of the party scene was the point at which the ballet’s usual plot began to change. Instead of returning to the tree in the middle of the night to check on her nutcracker, Clara fell asleep on the sofa with the nutcracker in her arms. Then came the rats, led in this instance by a Catwoman-like Rat Queen, danced by Melle Glatt, to strut their stuff in the dim red glow of the lights. They unwound a slowly menacing modern number to music that certainly was not written by Tchaikovsky but might have been written by Hans Zimmer.
The Rat Queen snatched the nutcracker from Clara, who snatched it back and, after having been flung around by the rats for a bit without her Nutcracker Prince coming to the rescue, clouted the Rat Queen herself. La rat morte, la reine morte. The toy soldiers came tap-dancing along, again to a remixed score, only to find that Clara had already taken care of the job. A group of snowflakes, members of one of SDA’s more advanced classes, fluttered along in their wake under the leadership of Sofia Wolf as the Snow Queen and improved their waltzing continuously throughout to a strong, well-executed and attention-grabbing finish for the first act.
Act two began with the arrival of the Sugar Plum Fairy, danced by guest performer Eastlyn Jensen of Ballet Arizona. Acting initially as mistress of ceremonies, she drew back the curtain on the sugarplums themselves, another of the junior classes in palest purple-tinted angel costumes.
The divertissimenti followed quickly thereafter and were made more diverting by the modifications that Phillips introduced, beginning with the Spanish movement, for which she choreographed a tango variation in which dancers in sinuous red dresses formed a series of harmonious pictures.
Mother Ginger was up next, sans hoopskirt; this Mother Ginger, played by Deborah Williams, literally elevated the role by striding on from stage right on stilts. This scene was a merry dance indeed, with her and her ginger children both stamping along to Tchaikovsky’s vigorous score with its sampling of the French classic “Cadet Rousselle.”
The Arabian variation was performed by younger dancers than is usual, again back in the modern style, and was followed by the Marzipan sequence, here danced by the senior ballet class with grace and good rhythm. As for the Russian divertissiment, it jazzed the show up with a freestyle party for the younger dancers to a high-energy remix of the composer’s original writing through which the original theme tripped in flashes.
Phoebe Jones made an elegant and confident Dew Drop in the subsequent Waltz of the Flowers, marshaling her buds with poise. Having no cavalier for a tarantella, the Sugar Plum Fairy danced her solo instead, with clean power and apparently tremulous but perfectly controlled pointe work. And then the stage filled with more and more of the dancers for a final waltz, and then there were all of them — and the Rat Queen was still quite dead, thanks to Clara.
