Content area
Full Text
When December comes, can The Nutcracker be far behind? No, it can't, not in America, anyway. And certainly not at the State Theater, where Balanchine's wonderful version is happily in residence until Jan. 4. But how does a critic justify returning to it again and again, that is, a critic whose children are too old for it and whose grandchildren are too young? The best excuse is catching an important debut in a central role like Sugarplum, not because it's the most challenging of parts, but because historically so many young comers have first been spotlighted this way. One wants to see what management is thinking, and why they're thinking it.
At a recent Saturday matinee, a new Sugarplum was unveiled. Her name is Megan Fairchild, and she's a dark-haired little thing who was featured at the S.A.B. workshop performances several years ago and almost immediately started getting attention in the company itself. She's assured and she's pleasing, but I'm afraid she's not yet a Sugarplum. Self-assurance isn't the same thing as command, and she isn't, as of now, either a dancer of grandeur and amplitude, a Farrell, a Nichols, a Tallchief (on whom Balanchine made the role), or a dancer of attack and refinement: a Merrill Ashley, a Gelsey Kirkland. Nor does she have the overwhelming allure and charm of an Allegra Kent or a Patricia McBride. She's nice, and she's going to be nicer, but this was an unhappy debut. She was in control in her opening solo, but she danced small; there was no expansiveness and not much expressivity. In the climactic pas de deux, there were partnering problems from the start (she was dancing with the highly charged newcomer from A.B.T., Joaquin de Luz). And then came disaster in the famous moment when Sugarplum places her toe on the invisible moving strip that's meant to slide her magically forward. I don't know who or what was to blame, but I've never seen this device misfire so badly.
Some aspects of The Nutcracker never change. Hugo Fiorato was conducting confidently, as he has been for 40 years. (Can he have been the original conductor back in St. Petersburg in 1892?) And gasps still erupt in the audience when the transfigured tree...