On September 18 in Melbourne, The Australian Ballet will lift the curtain on Sir Peter Wright’s acclaimed version of The Nutcracker, originally created for the Birmingham Royal Ballet.
Enhanced by Tchaikovsky’s rich score, this extravagant production - with its theatrical magic and cinematic quality - premiered in Birmingham on 29 December 1990 and has been a smash hit with audiences in the UK and Japan. “While it’s elegant and sophisticated in its staging, Wright’s Nutcracker has got that wonderfully magical feeling that’s like seeing a ballet for the first time as a child,” says Artistic Director David McAllister.
The story of The Nutcracker first appeared in a book of short tales by German writer Ernst Theador Amadeus Hoffman in 1816 as Nussknacker und Mauskönig (Nutcracker and the Mouse King). Like the Brothers’ Grimm fairytales of the time, the children’s tale bristled with dark undercurrents. Nearly eighty years later, with a libretto much more playful in tone and an epochal score by Tchaikovsky, Marius Petipa premiered The Nutcracker as a ballet in St Petersburg, Russia. It would go on to become hugely popular in the West. Christmas in Britain and the US is now unimaginable without endless permutations of the tale filling stages; countless tutu-clad ballerinas doing the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. First appearing on The Australian Ballet’s stages in 1963, The Nutcracker would become a perennial favourite here too.
Wright’s spectacular version was reimagined by celebrated UK designer John Macfarlane, one of the hottest properties in opera and ballet today. Macfarlane flew to Australia in May to oversee the design process and will return in September for the Australian premiere.
The story is fanciful – armies of rats, a Christmas tree that grows, sugar plum fairies, an enormous flying goose, a land of sweets – but at the heart of this production is a very real Clara, indulging in one last childish flight of fancy before adolescence creeps in. This Nutcracker is a breathtakingly rendered universe unto itself, realised in a million tiny details and large-scale endeavours.
The mammoth process of bringing The Nutcracker to Australia began in September last year, when a small group from The Australian Ballet’s production team flew to England to meet with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, while three members of the scenery team went to Tokyo to watch and document a Japanese performance of the ballet. Later, three of The Australian Ballet’s wardrobe team spent several weeks in London and Birmingham, scrutinising and cutting patterns from The Nutcracker’s original costumes, and beginning to source the fabrics.
This production of The Nutcracker will complete a landmark series of performances by The Australian Ballet of ballet’s ’big three’ – Graeme Murphy’s
Swan Lake, Stanton Welch’s The Sleeping Beauty and Wright’s The Nutcracker. The Australian Ballet is in possession of two of the world’s finest productions – Graeme Murphy’s very adult and quintessentially Australian Nutcracker, and now Peter Wright’s mammoth traditional production created on the Birmingham Royal Ballet. -- www.australianballet.com.au
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