Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut is a Christmas confection, but I first saw it in the summer. It was August of 1995, and my husband and I and our ten-year-old son traveled north from London to catch the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival. We were already fans of the Mark Morris Dance Group—I had fallen in love with L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato when it first premiered in America in 1990, and had subsequently helped organize a Berkeley conference around it—but we had no specific expectations for The Hard Nut and were basically just there for fun.
And it was fun. In that 1995 production, Morris himself had two roles—as a drunken party guest in the first-act Christmas party and, in the second half, as the leader of the Arabian women, a seductress with come-hither eyes and a swirling diaphanous caftan. Kraig Patterson played the black maid in toeshoes; a rather hefty opera singer, Peter Wing Healey, took the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum; the charming and diminutive June Omura played the rambunctious Fritz; and the incomparable Rob Besserer performed the central part of Herr Drosselmeier. The sets based on Charles Burns comics and the costumes of the party guests hilariously recalled the Sixties in a way that was both stylized and accurate. The party itself was a tremendous kick, and the various national dances performed in the second half were vigorous, playful, and (as always in Mark Morris) perfectly attuned to the music. I might have wished that some of the lovers’ duet between Marie and the Nutcracker Prince had been reduced a bit, or perhaps turned into dancing instead of kissing, and I might have found myself getting impatient with some of Tchaikovsky’s most romantic passages. (What was wrong with me?) I hope I noticed how beautiful the snowflake scene was, but more likely I was just thrilled by it, as first-time audiences always are.
After the performance, since we were acquainted with the dancers from their Berkeley visits, my family went around to the stage door to greet them in that foreign land. We were whisked inside and our son was instantly taken off to the dressing-rooms, where he was treated like the company mascot. Then he reappeared with a couple of company members, who informed us that the whole troupe had been invited to a party at the Lord Provost of Edinburgh’s official chambers: would we like to come along with them? Of course we would! So we climbed into their touring bus and spent the rest of the evening in one of the grandest public spaces I have ever partied in, complete with festive food, a bevy of excited dancers, a smattering of Edinburgh worthies, and the Lord Provost himself (who, if memory serves, gallantly shook my small son’s hand).
In the years since then, The Hard Nut was repeatedly performed in Berkeley around Christmas time, and we began to give a party for the dancers after the last performance. My husband and I felt like slightly less comic versions of Mr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum; at one point we even considered buying a videotape of a log fire to play on our TV during the party, just as the Stahlbaums do. My son became adept at serving the dancers their drinks—mainly bottles of beer retrieved from the ice-filled bathtub, which was the only place in the house big enough to chill that quantity of beer. The dancers ate and drank and smoked and laughed and mingled with the poets, writers, and academics we had assembled to meet them. At one party they even sang Christmas carols, accompanied on our out-of-tune old upright by Ethan Iverson, who is now a noted jazz performer in The Bad Plus but was then the dance group’s music director.
We haven’t given that MMDG holiday party for quite a while now—our schedule and the dancers’ made it impossible—but we still try to catch The Hard Nut whenever we can, and I have probably seen it at least ten times over the course of fifteen years. This year, my husband and I and our twenty-five-year old son and his girlfriend (herself a former dancer), along with almost all the freshmen in my Hunter Honors College arts class, caught it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Things have changed, of course. Morris hasn’t danced the Arabian princess role in a while, and this year he even gave up the drunken party guest in order to take over the part of Mr. Stahlbaum. Peter Wing Healey has long since been replaced by John Heginbotham, who dances the role of Mrs. Stahlbaum with such delicate beauty and emotional authenticity that stagehands have been known to fall in love with “her” until they learn, to their disappointment, that she is really a he. Marie and her Nutcracker Prince are now embodied by Lauren Grant and David Leventhal, a real-life married couple (both marvelous dancers) who manage to make even the kisses seem like dance. Passages that seemed slow or merely routine to me at first, such as the scene changes (which get some of the best music), or the thrilling way all the different characters come back in mismatched sets at the end, now make complete emotional sense. I have come to love the music—all the music. And though I regret the absence of key dancers from the company’s past, I appreciate the uniformly high skills of the new people who have arisen to take the roles of snowflakes, flowers, rats, GI Joes, and others.
Marvelously, Kraig Patterson is still the maid and June Omura is still Fritz; sadly, Rob Besserer has retired, and I miss him terribly, no matter who is dancing Herr Drosselmeier. But this year an impressive young dancer named William Smith III took on that demanding role, and I have great hopes for him. Smith has the necessary acting ability as well as the grace and strength to dance the part, and though I still see Besserer’s shadow around him (especially in the incredibly moving sequence—perhaps my favorite thing in all of dance—when Drosselmeier has a duet with his younger Nutcracker self, and then the snowflakes fly, and then the aging magician walks diagonally upstage through them, causing the spinning flakes to fall still as he passes), I can almost imagine a time when I will be able to admire his performance for itself alone.
—December 18, 2010