Nutcracker

(Rochester City Ballet, 28 November 2008)

The beginning of the end of Hollywood musicals (and a glorious beginning of the end at that) was in the 1950s. Musical productions about staging musical productions with thrice the number of musical numbers of a 1930s movie were all the vogue. The audiences coveted musical extravaganza, and it was delivered, sometimes at a cost in terms of the richness of the plot---broadly construed. The Nutcracker displays the symptoms of a deceased genre. It is a variety show in the second act and much grimacing in the first act.

Excellent dancing, in principle, will compensate for and possibly even obliterate the shortcomings of a dead genre. Ballet dancing is difficult and careers are short. Everyone can tell if dancing is good or bad. And some of it was indeed good this evening. Yet one cannot help but to wish for the excellent, even though this means to wish for the nearly impossible.