50 years of Nutcracker
Tchaikovsky’s beloved Christmas ballet plays Friday, Saturday and Dec. 7
By Andy Graham
November 30, 2008
“The Nutcracker” was first produced by Indiana University’s ballet theater two years after Ted Jones arrived in Bloomington.
“That means it was a good while ago,” Jones said with a chuckle last week.
Fifty years ago, to be exact, and IU has staged the Tchaikovsky ballet every year since as a holiday tradition.
This year’s golden anniversary production debuts Friday at 8 p.m., with additional performances at 8 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. both Saturday and Dec. 7 in IU’s Musical Arts Center. “Nutcracker Teas” will follow the weekend matinees, offering cookies and beverages in the MAC lobby along with chances for children and their families to greet and take photographs with cast members.
The MAC was still 13 years away back in 1959, when Jones orchestrated lighting for the original IU “Nutcracker.”
“The ballet department, at the time, was still housed in a shack behind the old East Hall building,” Jones recalled. “Gilbert and Nancy Reed really comprised the whole program. She helped make the costumes and was a fantastic tutu maker, in the tradition of the Mariinsky ballet in St. Petersburg (where ‘The Nutcracker’ ballet debuted at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in 1892). Those were too expensive to buy, but she could make them.
“‘Nutcracker’ was certainly the biggest production IU ballet had tried to do, ever, with all the kids involved and everything entailed.” 
IU, which is also in the midst of celebrating the 60th anniversary of its opera theater, was already mounting annual productions of Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Auditorium, and featured that work 21 years in a row before shifting to periodic presentations of it. Jones said that East Hall, the military building erected in 1948 on the site now occupied by the MAC, “was not suitable for dance at all, really.”
The auditorium wasn’t optimal, either, in regard to accommodating an orchestra for a ballet. Jones said that IU ballets staged there often depended upon chamber music ensembles, piano accompaniment or even recorded music. He went abroad from 1961 till 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship intent, in part, on rectifying that. He studied European facilities in researching and developing plans for the MAC.
East Hall burned in 1968 and the MAC came on line in 1972, which engendered changes in IU’s approach with “The Nutcracker.”
C. David Higgins, whose most recent set design will again provide backdrops for the choreography of ballet department chairman Michael Vernon in the current production, said the MAC’s advantages outweighed the loss of seating capacity from the Auditorium.
“There was some hope in some quarters that we’d return to Auditorium, where we could seat more people (3,200 compared to the MAC’s 1,460), but the production we have now is really designed for the MAC and wouldn’t work in the Auditorium,” said Higgins, who came to IU in 1965 and was first involved in ‘The Nutcracker’ as a dancer. “The stage is bigger and better equipped at the MAC.
“This current production the most elaborate of all the ‘Nutcrackers’ I’ve ever done. There are lots of things that move, and effects such as fiber-optic lighting and rear-projection lighting. There are a lot of things that other companies couldn’t do.”
IU has completely revamped its ‘Nutcracker’ production five times during the 50-year run, and opera studies department chairman Higgins has done sets for two of the productions, but he has contributed to 10 ‘Nutcrackers’ overall both in this country and overseas. “I don’t want to brag, but IU’s is probably one of the more elaborate ‘Nutcrackers’ out there, particularly in the Midwest,” he said.
London native Vernon also has a distinguished international background regarding ‘Nutcracker’ performance and choreography and, as with Higgins, is impressed by the sort of production IU is able to mount.
“I was very pleased,” Vernon said after his first involvement with IU’s ‘Nutcracker’ last year. “Our production staff at the MAC supported me so well. It was a production I was proud of.” 
Vernon’s past associations include the New York City Ballet, where George Balanchine’s 1954 ground-breaking production of “The Nutcracker” paved the way for its modern popularity, especially in the United States. Vernon also has worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who created his own version of ‘The Nutcracker’ for the American Ballet Theatre in 1976.
IU has featured and will continue to mount productions from The George Balanchine Trust under Vernon’s leadership.
Among the “tweaks” Vernon said he has made to IU’s “Nutcracker” is utilizing children for the key role of Clara, previously played by college-age students in celebrated productions choreographed by IU faculty member Jacques Cesbron. Vernon has turned to students in IU’s pre-college ballet program to fill the role the past two years.
“I used the set in a different way, too,” Vernon said. “Each choreographer can hear the music in a different way, it speaks differently to every person, so my vision is different just because it’s me listening to it. There is magic to the story, a certain romance, which is what I hear in the music.” He identifies four “high points” on which he hinges his production, the snow scene in Act I and the waltz of the flowers in Act II involving the corps de ballet, and pas de deux featuring the Snow Queen in Act I and the Sugar Plum Fairy in Act II.”
Higgins noted there are “somewhere along the lines of 200 productions in this country” of “The Nutcracker,” and that Vernon hoped to mount another wholly original production at IU in upcoming years, once financing and scheduling permits. He wasn’t sure about the time frame for that, but suffice to say IU plans to continue its holiday tradition.
Vernon thinks “The Nutcracker’s” popularity is easily sustained.
“First of all, it’s seasonal,” Vernon said. “Very few ballets are, especially regarding holidays so widely celebrated. Also one of the main characters is the child, and there are children involved, which is also one of its enduring qualities. And the third big thing is just the music.
“Tchaikovsky himself, before the music was heard of a complete ballet, did a suite of eight or nine pieces from it. That’s why some people still mistakenly call (the ballet) ‘The Nutcracker Suite.’ He was proud of the music. It stands on its own in the concert hall. That’s been true all these years. People who aren’t generally familiar with the classics or with ballet know this music. It pleases them. It’s very universal.”
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
