A Nutcracker Ballet by Any Other Name
Staff | December 12, 2014 | Comment
Nutcracker courtesy of Ulster Publishing
The joy of experiencing the Nutcracker Ballet for the very first time starts with the raising of the curtain on the Stahlbaum home on Christmas Eve, a large and grand house with the most beautiful tree imaginable.
The audience hears the sounds of the Tchiakovsky Nutcracker Suite rise from the orchestra pit.
They see the dancers, both young and older, come on stage in merriment; not yet knowing of the adventure story that will unfold for young Clara at the stroke of midnight. All thanks to Uncle Drosselmeyer and his magical Nutcracker.
Happily, there is still time to get tickets to a performance of The Nutcracker this holiday season!
Starting TONIGHT, (December 12th), at Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston, the Catskill Ballet Theatre will be performing this holiday classic with noted professional dancers through December 14th.
Meanwhile, the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie will play host to The Nutcracker with Dancers from the NYC Ballet and the New Paltz School of Ballet, Saturday, December 13th and Sunday, December 14th.
Starting December 18 and running until the 21st, the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Orchestra collaborates with the Artisan Dance Company to bring Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece to Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center in Sugar Loaf for the first time.
The other great joys of seeing The Nutcracker is to witness many interpretations of this iconic ballet. The Colonial Nutcracker, an annual holiday favorite, presented by Dance Theater in Westchester, is offering a matinee performance on Saturday, December 20th at the Paramount Hudson Valley in Peekskill. This full-length production, is set in Colonial Yorktown during the American Revolution, and is a narrated ballet sure to delight all who attend.
For those with a certain, shall we say, sense of humor, they’ll likely prefer the slapstick wit and merry interpretation of The Nutcracker by The Bang Group in Nut/Cracked. Staged at the Richard Fisher Center at Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, Saturday, December 20th and Sunday, December 21st, Nut/Cracked “has delighted audiences for more than a decade. It takes its inspiration from all corners of the dance canon, from tap riffs to en pointe ballet, by way of bubble wrap, disco, and Chinese take-out noodles.”
So many choices and they’re all here in the Hudson Valley!
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