The Nutcracker

Cork Opera House

Contemporary presentations of

The Nutcracker

are bedevilled by choice. This Cork City Ballet production has to decide between several different versions of a story that is already limited and that expands only to allow for divertissements and suites to match Tchaikovsky’s extravagant score.

In a nutshell, then, young Masha (or Clara) is given a Christmas gift of a nutcracker in the shape of a toy soldier. Her Christmas party includes a puppet show, and when it ends she falls asleep and dreams of nutcracker prince, puppet mice, snow-wrapped forests and a lot of confectionery. All these, along with the party toys, come to life on stage and dance through a series of enchantments. And then Masha wakes up.

Not much to go on, really, but director Alan Foley adapts the Petipa/Ivanov choreography with his own variations, along with those of Yuri Demakov. His dancers, especially Chika Temma and Emil Faski, engage totally with the verve of the recorded Russian State Orchestra.

The trimming necessary to suit a corps de balletthat is limited in numbers if not in skill is sometimes a little too obvious and, despite excellent costumes, the narrative fantasy is weakened by the absence of those magic transformations that make some kind of sense imaginatively. The Christmas tree is notably short of sparkle, and the painted back-cloths are not adequate as sets, although there is both sparkle and imagination in the snowflake scene.

What really distinguishes this performance is the radiance of the principal dancers, which is almost equalled by the ebullient but well-schooled junior corps. MARY LELAND