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Cracking The Hard Nut
| Article
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19735 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
1,219 Words |
| Author
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Maya Wallach
Maya Wallach is a dance writer, critic, and photographer
currently based in Los Angeles |
Mark Morris is clearly on a roll. His American tour last summer was an all-out triumph. His much awaited version of ballet's classic Nutcracker has gotten him not only wildly enthusiastic audience response but the best reviews of any of his productions under his three-year contract with Brussels' Monnaie Opera House, which ends this June.
In matters of dance, Morris likes to claim that he is a classicist. His new look at Nutcracker, which he has titled The Hard Nut, premiered at the Royal Monnaie Theatre with the Monnaie Dance Group/Mark Morris in January and threatened to prove him wrong even before the curtain opened. The young American choreographer made a kind of campy blend of the somber, Germanic fantasy forming the original Nutcracker story and a comic-book adaptation by Morris based on the work of cartoonist Charles Burns. The cartoonist's work appears in Rolling Stone, Spy, and National Lampoon. High and low culture thus co-exist felicitously on stage.
The music was still Tchaikovsky's familiar strains, but the costumes were pure sixties Retro. Three hip teenagers saunter in front of the curtain. Setting in front of an invisible television, backs to the audience, they fidget with their hair, flipping through a fashion magazine as the overture plays.
The curtain goes up on a stark black and white room (designed by Adrianne Lobel) with a television (black and white, of course) placed directly in front of the three teenagers. They too are dressed (by Martin Pakledinaz) in black and white. Marie (Clarice Marshall) is in a white tulle prom skirt. Her brother Fritz (Marianne Moore) has a knit vest, jeans, and high-top sneakers. Her sister Louise (Tina Fehlandt) wears a short, slinky dress of the sixties.
Color erupts in the form of their mother, the enormous Mrs. Stahlbaum (Peter Wing Healey). Decked out in a red and green Christmas gown, she shoos her children off to get ready for their Christmas Eve party. Then, looking for all the world like a grand Russian etoile thirty years past her prime, she greets the audience with a dignified, restrained--and hilarious--classical dance.
The party takes place in 1960s middle-class American living room, complete with a white Naugahyde sofa in front of a pitch-black picture window. Black and white wrapped presents are piled beneath a white Christmas tree. There is no need for a fireplace: Mr. Stahlbaum (Erin Matthiessen) switches the TV to an image of a burning
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