BALLET REVIEW : ‘Rabbit’: It’s More Thud Than Thump

‘Tis the season for some folly, the season to be charmed--if that is the right word--by corps after corps of cutesy creatures on tippy-toes.

After many a Yule, the swan turns into a sugarplum. Sigh.

That’s just the beginning. Mice dance, and toy soldiers prance. Flowers waltz. Fake Christmas trees become skyscrapers before our wandering eyes. Incipient-ballerinas pretend that they are just sweet little girls, and danseurs nobles masquerade as heroic nutcrackers.

It tends to be worse than fruitcake. Even with Tchaikovsky’s wondrous score, it is more than some of us fossils can bear.

This year, this fossil thought he’d try something different. That turned out to be a mistake.

Instead of all the predictable dross from Drosselmeyer, in place of the fey adventures in Candyland of adorable little Clara or Masha or Marie or Gelsey or whatever her name is, your faithful long-suffering, callous, curmudgeonly scribe opted for the world premiere, in San Diego, of something billed as a “family ballet.”

As the cruel Fates would have it, “The Velveteen Rabbit,” which opened a seven-performance stand at the Spreckels Theater on Wednesday, offers very little for anyone in the family older than 4 1/2. And it isn’t much of a ballet.

At least it is short. The opening performance began at 8, paused for a merciful intermission, and still ended before 9:30.

On second thought, it didn’t seem all that short. It seemed like a 15-minute dancing-school skit padded and padded and padded with pretension and irrelevant exercises.

Normally, any benign observer with a head full of holly would shrug a shoulder or two and walk away whistling a happy carol. As Mama always said while she wagged her trusty forefinger, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.”

Sorry, Mama.

This production shouldn’t have looked so amateurish. Tickets cost as much as $30. It shouldn’t have sounded so perverse.

It was staged by a respectable ensemble called ODC/San Francisco (the initials stand for Oberlin Dance Collective), and it made the ambitious trip southward with help from some impressive sources: Wells Fargo Bank, the city of San Diego and the California Arts Council, not to mention the GAP Foundation and Reader’s Digest.

If only credentials could dance. If only the people responsible for this quasi-translation of Margery Williams’ children’s book had approached their task with a bit more wit, with a better sense of focus, and with some notion of narrative style.

“The Velveteen Rabbit” is, you may recall, the harey tale of a stuffed animal that becomes a real honest-to-goodness thumper through the magic of innocent love. The fragile story warms the cockles of the heart--well, some cockles, anyway. To achieve credibility in the rarefied land of the arabesques, however, it would need the vision of a really imaginative, tasteful, whimsical choreographer--preferably a genius.

Where is Frederick Ashton when we need him, anyway?

The craftsperson on duty here is KT, a.k.a. Katie, Nelson. She has cranked out a lot of clumsy pantomime and a little hopping, skipping, flopping and posing to accompany--sometimes to illustrate and occasionally to contradict--a taped reading of Williams’ text. Nelson asks her hard-working little ensemble to execute maneuvers that vacillate between dull literalism and clumsy abstraction.

For the score, which ought to be charming, Nelson misappropriates some dark and serious music of Benjamin Britten, interspersed with inane ditties by one Bob Franke. For sets and costumes, Brian Wildsmith has designed bargain-basement decorations that look improvised, which is OK, and uninspired, which isn’t.

Geoff Hoyle provides the voice on the soundtrack. Lizanne McAdams owns the body trapped in the unchanging, saggy rabbit suit of the titular toy. Robert Moses is the very manly boy who cuddles her in fragmentary pas-de-deux embraces. Julie Kanter owns the upper torso of the towering housekeeper who keeps an untitled porteur under her skirts in a pallid out-take from Pilobolus. Lisa Wallgren impersonates a Skinhorse who is skinny if not horsey and, more serious, seems neither wise nor worn.

Everyone tries to be engaging and cute and ultimately poignant. In vain.

Back to those infernal snowflakes in tutus. Back to nasty friend Fritz and his hostile army. Back to Mother Ginger and her ever-multiplying Kinder .

Humbug.