Dancers remember 50 years of ‘The Nutcracker’ at the Pennsylvania Ballet

The Pennsylvania Ballet had been performing for only four years when, in 1968, Barbara Weisberger presented Act II of George Balanchine’s Nutcracker at the Academy of Music, giving Philadelphia its most loved holiday tradition. The company has had its ups and downs over the years — it was recovering from one such down in 1987 when then-artistic director Robert Weiss presented an ambitious new million-dollar production of the full Balanchine Nutcracker we know today.

Drosselmeyer at 13

I was going through old photos at the studio, thinking about The Nutcracker’s 50th anniversary, when Ian Hussey wandered over, carrying Ana Calderon’s baby, Mateo. Hussey is dancing Drosselmeyer this year. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to the boy/nutcracker prince in the photograph from 1998. Then he pointed out Maria (Tamara Allison) and the adults in the photo: Alexei Charov and Valerie Amiss, who is now a teacher at the Pennsylvania Ballet School.

Hussey was 13 in the photo, his fourth and last year in the part (they had to lengthen the costume for him). “It was pretty surreal being the lead of a show like that,” he said, “I wanted more of it, so decided to make a career out of it.” When I asked if he’d done Nutcracker every year, he said, “Yep. Every one of them. Never missed one.” Not even when he had the flu, because “the show must go on.”

Children’s ballet mistress Jaime Santoro showed us some of her own photos from 1988, when she danced Marie. Asked how she came to ballet, she said, “My mom took me to see The Nutcracker. And I was like, I want to do this, and so she took me down to register me. And I had no shoes, no tights.… I auditioned in street clothes.” That was 1983, when Santoro was six. She trained at the School of the Pennsylvania Ballet until she was 18, then left to dance in Orlando. When she came home to retire, Angel Corella hired her to set the children for Nutcracker. It was “a 360,” she said: from dancing Marie to teaching The Nutcracker to the children at her old school.

A dancer's home

Everyone I spoke to had Nutcracker memories. Marketing director Jonathan Stiles danced with the company for 15 years. He remembered a shoe that fell off in the middle of the Candy Cane dance — he held it in his hand while he jumped the hoops. For the last third of his dance career, he performed Drosselmyer, an incredible role, he says. “You really do get to feel like it’s magic,”

The key to the magic is the history: not in the abstract, but in the lived experience of the generations of dancers past, present, and future. For most, Nutcracker is the first ballet they see and the first they dance. Stiles said his 5-year-old already dances it around the apartment, even when it is not the holidays. The Nutcracker becomes a touchstone for dancers — a home of sorts.

For the audience, the magic is in the history too: the excitement they felt as children in their holiday clothes under the sparkling Academy of Music chandelier, falling in love with the ballet the moment they set eyes on the Russian dancers or the Sugar Plum Fairy. And each year they share the magic with the next generation.

The Pennsylvania Ballet presents The Nutcracker from December 7 through 31 at the Academy of Music (240 South Broad Street, Philadelphia). Visit paballet.org or call (215) 893-1999.