At the stroke of midnight national tour12/31/2023 As the grown-up Clara, Daria Klimentova is supremely assured and fluent of line, a ballerina at the height of her expressive powers. If this production's narrative underpinnings are at times shaky, its central performances restore our belief. Over the incomprehensibly bizarre Arabian dance, with its bullwhipping Sheikh ( Arionel Vargas), we will draw a veil. In the divertissements, Ksenia Ovsyanick is a delicious Mirliton, and Ken Saruhashi nails the tour en l'air sequences in the Russian dance with fine panache. The Act 1 Snowflakes are charming, although we could have done with a lot more actual snow, and the Act 2 Waltz of the Flowers fetchingly shows off the ENB corps. Who is he, Michael Jackson?" demanded one audience member in the first interval.Įagling's choreography works best in the ensemble numbers. The very apparent differences between the two dancers don't make things any less perplexing. Throughout the ballet, Junor Souza dances a masked version of the character while Vadim Muntagirov, who also plays the nephew of the magician Drosselmeyer (Fabian Reimair), dances him unmasked. It's with the character of the Nutcracker that things get weird. The giant rats and mice who invade the house on the stroke of midnight are baleful and sinister, James Streeter playing their king with dark piratical swagger. The children (from Tring Park school for the performing arts) are excellent, and the adults affectionately drawn, especially Michael Coleman's bluff Grandfather. Eagling takes his time establishing his characters. The mise-en-scène is magical: a Christmas Eve party in a London mansion, children in their party clothes, and skaters whirling past on the frozen Thames outside. Wayne Eagling's production of The Nutcracker for English National Ballet has moments of the purest enchantment, but is flawed by hard-to-follow storytelling.
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