Dance Reviews : Long Beach ‘Nutcracker’ Has Too Many Ornaments

Crammed with special effects, the familiar Long Beach Ballet version of “The Nutcracker” has nearly everything that money can buy. This year, the spare-no-expense innovations include a shower of fireworks behind the production’s trademark flying sleigh, the dancing of two guests from the Bolshoi Ballet and the authoritative conducting of ballet specialist Patrick Flynn.

Obviously, if all you want from any “Nutcracker” is an opulent, family-oriented, nominally cultural holiday entertainment, seek (and read) no further.

Those who prize choreography and dancing may be less satisfied. On Saturday afternoon at the Terrace Theater, the version by David Wilcox and Terri Lewis again lurched from broad storytelling pantomime to faceless classicism and back for no apparent reason. Clara kept going onto pointe and noodling about--but who could tell how her steps and poses related to her feelings or the plot? The why of this version proved very weak indeed.

Corps passages (including the Mirlitons ensemble) looked well drilled Saturday afternoon, but all of the company soloists were technically unreliable except for the accomplished Helena Ross as Dewdrop. Indeed, Ross’ refinement and the bravura of the Bolshoi guests only heightened the sub-professional execution of Long Beach Ballet as a whole.

Dancing their Bolshoi choreography in their Bolshoi costumes, Vitali Artyushkin and his wife, Alla Khaniashvili-Artyushkina, capitalized on the extreme stretch and velocity of Soviet style. Unfortunately, they also demonstrated some of the crudities of that style: stop-and-go phrasing (lots of walking and waiting between feats) and the tendency to force virtuosity onto unsuitable music.

Artyushkina is far too unyielding a dancer to be an ideal Sugar Plum Fairy--if she had been in the original cast, Tchaikovsky would probably have scored her solo for steel guitar rather than celesta. But she can do turns brilliantly, and did on Saturday at every opportunity. Her husband partnered her attentively and their daughter appeared with 19 other kiddies in the Mother Ginger divertissement.

Twins Meagan and Leah Watson doubled as Clara, bringing off switcheroo effects in both acts. Dudley Davies made a sprightly Drosselmeyer and Tzer-Shing Wang looked highly promising as the Snow Queen.