Nutcracker
San Francisco Ballet
The story was that wind
had broken all the panes in the Conservatory of Flowers, and Willie Brown
wasn’t going to fix it. There it lay for years, until suddenly it was
repaired and this ballet was set in the Conservatory at the time of the 1915
Pan-American Exposition (with accompanying historical film), whence comes the
Palace of Fine Arts.
Nothing peculiar or
extraordinary in the production, except perhaps a slight hesitation delicately
phrased in the young ballerina, and the lighted background varied throughout.
The dancing girls in their red-white-and-blue with ribbons, the Russians,
Spaniards and Chinese, the Arab houri, Mother Ginger a circus tent with
clowns and bear, the pas de deux for which the
dreaming girl is prepared by transforming her plain white nightgown into a
golden tutu, and the Valse des Fleurs given extraordinary point.