COVER STORY : In a dismal era for ballet, dance troupes are relying on some 102-year-old Tchaikovsky magic and the fact that, traditionally, the holidays are. . . : ‘Nutcracker’ Time

‘Tis the season when otherwise normal people think seriously of dallying with fairies and living toys in the Sugar Plum Kingdom.

That, at least, is the theory among most classical dance promoters. There’s such a seasonal appetite for Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker,” they say, that it guarantees a big box office every time.

Once upon a time, that may have been true. But in recent years, producing the holiday favorite has become a financial gamble.

In the midst of a dismal period for classical dance in Southern California, resident companies and a few touring groups--from the Joffrey Ballet to the Channel Islands Ballet--are optimistically staging versions of the 102-year-old chestnut.

One of the most elaborate, the Los Angeles Classical Ballet production, opened Friday at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, complete with 140 dancers, half a dozen headliners including prima ballerinas Cynthia Harvey and Evelyn Cisneros, a live horse and a 60-piece orchestra.

“When we do it, we do it full-out,” says David Wilcox, artistic director of the group. “The Nutcracker” runs through Sunday at the Terrace, then moves to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Dec. 22-24.

The $750,000 production is the only one of the year for the struggling Long Beach-based dance group, which once aspired to be the resident dance company of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts.

Like other dance groups in Southern California, the Los Angeles Classical is only a true “company” during the six weeks it takes to rehearse and stage a ballet. It has six permanent employees, none of them dancers. “We’re as permanent a company as you get (in Southern California),” Wilcox says.

Like others, the Los Angeles Classical’s “Nutcracker” is the company’s only chance this year to bring in some significant revenue. Despite the ballet’s popularity, dance companies have discovered, the payoffs are not guaranteed. Two years ago, the company’s “Nutcracker” broke even instead of producing an expected $300,000 in revenues.

“The sales were just not there,” says Louis Skelton, former board chairman, who added that the production made money last year. Some recent productions of the classic by other companies have lost money, dance professionals say.

To compete with television and other forms of entertainment, Wilcox says, ballets have to aim for the spectacular. “Our audience has to be blown away by spectacular balletic feats, dazzling scenery, fantastic music,” he says.

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With no standing corps of dancers, putting together a “Nutcracker” is something like raising an army from scratch in four weeks--complete with front-line soldiers, reserves and logistics units.

In the days leading up to opening night, the company’s headquarters on Wardlow Road percolated with so much activity that the walls seemed to bulge outward.

Production manager Monique L’Hereux and staff worked their way through an hour-by-hour schedule of essential tasks, from “add lights and spots” to “dry-ice rehearsal” (for fog and dream scenes). A squad of sales operators handled ticket orders, which came in at a greater pace than last year, they said. Carpenters were dispatched to a warehouse to pick through huge scenery panels, repaint sets and repair props.

And in three big rooms with mirrored walls, dancers rehearsed.

The Napoleon for this dancing army is Wilcox, the usually unexcitable artistic director, an energetic man with pale blue eyes and receding sandy-gray hair.

“The objective here is that the dancers are so well-rehearsed that at no time during the ballet do you see them fumbling or tripping,” he said.

Two dozen dancers at that moment glided and spun through a Tchaikovsky waltz under the hawk-like gaze of ballet mistress Julia Ellis. There was a measure of fumbling and tripping, as well as a few near-collisions and, at the end, some gasping for breath.

Then, the dancers listened to a rambling critique from the London-born Ellis, concluding with an appeal for more precise technique.

“Girls, quite a few of you are doing bent-kneed chainees ,” Ellis said, referring to a standard turning movement. “Work on this.” She pointed to her own slightly bent knees, which she straightened with deliberate movement and a grunt. “Eh! Straighten those legs!”

Wilcox’s company was born in 1982 as the Long Beach Ballet. In 1991, seeking to give the organization a broader regional base, he renamed it the Los Angeles Classical Ballet. Those were flush times for the company, which had performances of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and “Coppelia” under its belt and planned an ambitious 36-week season.

But late in 1991, the company began experiencing funding problems. According to former board chairman Skelton, the problems began with the region’s recession and defense cutbacks, which prompted large-scale layoffs at McDonnell Douglas, Long Beach’s largest employer, and elsewhere. Suddenly, people had less money to spend on show tickets, he says.

“Simultaneously with all of that, we had just invested $200,000 in costumes,” Skelton said.

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By 1992, economic times were so hard that even “Nutcracker” sales plummeted. Corporate donations dropped as well, he adds. Last year, the company was more than $500,000 in debt.

The company’s strategy has been to ride out the doldrums, limiting its productions to the tried-and-true “Nutcracker,” and to come back in 1995 with a more ambitious program, Wilcox says. “We pulled way back. We wanted to make sure we got through this period.”

The annual season has been reduced from 20 weeks to six, and debts are slowly being paid, Wilcox said.

About $175,000 of the company’s short-term debts were paid off last year with “Nutcracker” profits, Skelton said. Most of the remainder, Wilcox said, will be paid off after the current production, which had sold $700,000 worth of tickets by early this week. The company needs to sell about $850,000 to cover production and administrative costs, Wilcox said.

As a sign of the company’s rebounding health, Wilcox has scheduled a new production of Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” at the Terrace for next fall.

The Los Angeles Classical Ballet’s financial difficulties are hardly unique, dance professionals say. Even nationally prominent groups are struggling. For example, the Joffrey recently canceled part of its spring season, and the American Ballet Theatre also canceled some performances, including a three-day January engagement at the San Diego Civic Theatre.

By regional standards, the Los Angeles Classical, with its apparent upward financial trend, is doing relatively well, says Serena Tripi, board president of the Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles, a support group for local dance professionals.

“There are no big companies in Los Angeles (and the surrounding region), but there are tons of smaller ones,” Tripi says. “Finding funds is a constant struggle.”

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By last week, the Los Angeles Classical production was beginning to come into sharper focus.

Master carpenter Bill Yates and a crew of 10 had moved the ballet’s 30,000 pounds of scenery from the company’s warehouse on Daisy Street to the 3,117-seat Terrace, which is part of the Long Beach Convention Center complex. They had also repainted most of the props, such as a throne and giant Christmas gift boxes, and replaced worn scrims on the show’s assortment of drop sets.

“The scenery fills the Terrace to overflowing,” Yates said with a touch of wonder in his voice. “We had to hang one piece off the back wall because it doesn’t fit in the rigging.”

Meanwhile, calls for tickets were lighting up the pad on the telephone in Wilcox’s office. “Look at this,” he said, watching the telephone admiringly. “It’s going bonkers this year!”

Upstairs, in the stuffy loft office where six ticket representatives handled telephone sales, there were a few stray calls for tickets for Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, who preceded the ballet at the Terrace. But “Nutcracker” calls, said supervisor Elaine Graham, were arriving in big, cash-register-ringing waves.

“Some of the matinees are already close to being sold out,” she said.

But the busiest people on Wardlow Road appeared to be wardrobe mistress/costume designer Donna Dickens and her assistant, Brenda Wyatt, who were still fitting dancers and stitching clasps two days before opening night.

“We’re dealing with 130 to 140 people here,” Dickens said in her makeshift shop in a trailer, where dancers were hopping in and out of costumes.

Dickens poked at a dress draped incongruously around David Markham, a brawny man who plays Mother Ginger, out of whose tent-like skirts pop two dozen schoolchildren in jester costumes.

“We’ll probably be working 18 to 20 hours a day from here on,” said Dickens, who has designed the production’s new flare-skirted Spanish dancer costumes.

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Wilcox, a former principal dancer with the Berlin Ballet, is a seemingly unflappable presence in all of this, working out a scheduling problem with stage manager Diana McGuigan, meeting with a few of the more than 100 volunteers and chaperons for children in the show and explaining a step to one of his dancers.

But occasionally, he is blindsided. On this day, Anton Labuschange, associate director and the dancing Cavalier in “The Nutcracker,” is the messenger. One of the prima ballerinas, who appears in the show with her dancer husband, is demanding toe shoes. For free.

The principals buy their own, Wilcox says, clenching his jaw.

“She insists,” Labuschange says.

“What about the thousands of dollars we’re giving her?” Wilcox says. “What about the hotel room? The per diem?”

Finally, he relents, allocating three pairs of shoes to the ballerina. “And her husband gets two,” Labuschange said. Wilcox throws his hands up in defeat.

Most of the dancers in the ballet have performed in “Nutcracker” so many times that they must search for inspiration.

“I’ve done every single part,” Labuschange says. “I’ve done it so many times, I feel like Yul Brynner doing ‘The King and I.’ ”

Evelyn Cisneros, a Long Beach-born dancer who is now a principal with the San Francisco Ballet, says she draws inspiration from the audience. “You try to find something new to play with--the musicality, playing the character,” Cisneros says. “You gain the lightness and sparkle from the children in the audience.”

In fact, Cisneros is a kind of traveling Sugar Plum Fairy this season, performing the role in such cities as Toledo, Detroit and San Francisco. With the Los Angeles Classical, she shares the demanding role with Cynthia Harvey, former Bolshoi Ballet dancer Lilia Mousavarova and Lisa Cueto, a Wilcox student.

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At the dress rehearsals, the four weeks of practice and planning were beginning to show results. Wilcox stood at the edge of the stage, watching every move critically.

There were still some staging problems. The battle between the toy soldiers and the mice was a muddle, with young dance students playing the mice looking confused about what they were supposed to do. Mother Ginger’s broad skirts--which covered a rolling platform as well as her brood of children--got tangled.

But the ballet orchestra, directed by Cal State Long Beach professor Roger Hickman, was sounding crisp, giving the dance numbers on stage an added elegance.

Wilcox is scornful of ballet groups that perform “The Nutcracker” with taped music. “To perform without a symphony orchestra is artistically a major failing,” he says. “People don’t go to the theater to listen to a CD.”

The Los Angeles Classical first performed “The Nutcracker” in 1983, in a modest $50,000 production. This year’s $750,000 production is the company’s 12th.

Someone asks Wilcox if it gets easier each year.

“Easier?” he asks, brushing a hand through his hair. “That’s like asking, ‘Does life get easier?’ ”