The Nutcracker. The Australian Ballet
The Sunday Age
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Nutcracker. The Australian Ballet, State Theatre, the Arts Centre. Until 29 September. $126-$34. Tel. 1300 136 166
4/5The Australian Ballet's annual calendar usually contains a familiar range: your tutu extravaganzas, your tributes to great choreographers, your pure dance designed to thrill ballet-literate regulars. And then there are the all-stops-out, no-set-too-large Christmas-cake spectaculars that draw gasps even from those who wouldn't know a plie from a pirouette.The Nutcracker in a nutshell, really. It's a fast and frenzied confection that - in this production, based on the Birmingham Royal Ballet's version - never dwells on moments of purely technical excellence, instead sweeping its audience up in a mass of colour and movement. On opening night, Madeleine Eastoe was perfectly cast as the childlike Clara who is taken on a journey into a world of warring mice and tin soldiers, snowscapes and dancers from exotic lands. Steven Heathcote took on the role of the magician Drosselmeyer with obvious relish - fans concerned over his recent retirement as a principal were just as audibly enthusiastic - while Robert Curran as the titular soldier is fast proving a worthy successor to Heathcote's two-and-a-half decade legacy. If technique here takes second place to spectacle, it's not to disparage the dancers. Amid a set that at times made it seem as if the entire State Theatre stage was in motion, it's hard to compete. The final pas de deux between Curran and Lucinda Dunn as the Sugar Plum Fairy is an exception, and Dunn's is a precise, muscular command of the role.This is the kind of production that will likely have plenty of kids pleading with the parents for ballet lessons over summer, and as the last AB opening for the year it's a definite crowd-pleaser - young or old.
© 2007 The Sunday Age