A Delectable ‘Nut’

As the ballet classics of the 19th century degenerate into meaningless star vehicles in traditional restagings, contemporary choreographers such as Mark Morris have updated the antique narratives to their own lifetimes, adding invigorating doses of social satire and emerging with deeply personal, double-edged creations.

At the core of “The Hard Nut,” Morris’ wildly irreverent 1991 “Nutcracker” adaptation, is a belief in the power of love--and classical dance--to achieve miraculous transformations. You can’t get more profoundly traditional than that.

Until Saturday, when the Mark Morris Dance Group presented its West Coast premiere in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley, “The Hard Nut” had been danced only in Brussels, New York and Edinburgh, though it has become familiar elsewhere through a 1992 PBS telecast and home video edition.

It won’t be playing the Southland this Christmas--regrettable, because the look of it is much more remarkable than the TV version began to suggest.

Based on the designs of comic-book artist Charles Burns, the physical production is startling from the moment the curtain goes up, with sets by Adrianne Lobel that frame the stage in enormous concentric black circles and place within that vortex a black-and-white abstraction of 1960s suburbia for the party scene.

Against her colorless backdrops, the livid reds and greens of Martin Pakledinaz’s floridly decorated hippie-era costumes spell vulgarity in capital letters and establish the shotgun wedding between past and present that Morris intends to consummate.

In the pit: director of Cal Performances Robert Cole, leading the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in a distinctively caring, authoritative performance of Tchaikovsky’s beloved score. On the stage, brilliantly synchronized with that score: the hokey pokey, the hesitation, the stroll, obnoxious children, out-of-control parents, horny guests, drunken attempts at seduction--and one little girl named Marie (Marianne Moore) who comes to love a broken nutcracker.

With drag-casting a key comic component, the production careens into the mouse battle and snow ensemble, still retelling the standard story in its unique way and always honoring the music. However, in the second act--the point at which nearly every other “Nutcracker” has no story left--”The Hard Nut” justifies its title by adapting an action scheme from the original E.T.A. Hoffmann tale that sets the familiar divertissements in a new dramatic context.

(In the Arabian dance, cut from the TV version, Morris himself turns up as a veiled houri, shaking his coin-laden chest and devastating four men wearing turbans, burnooses and sunglasses.)

In the finale, Marie goes off as usual with her Nutcracker prince (William Wagner), but this time they’re on a TV screen, watched in suburbia by her nasty siblings.

The choreography for “The Hard Nut” proves just as outrageous, eclectic and skillful as the storytelling, with handfuls of snow-confetti flung by the 22-member corps to highlight each surge in “The Waltz of the Snowflakes” and apelike arm swings used to punctuate the delirious mock formalism of “The Waltz of the Flowers.”

The divertissements mostly parody the excesses of folkloric performance. But true lyricism ennobles two related duets: Drosselmeyer (Rob Besserer) and his Nutcracker-nephew in Act 1, the nephew and Marie in Act 2.

Moreover, outbursts of ballet-dancing periodically occur in the most unlikely places--with Peter Wing Healey as Marie’s mother especially prone to sudden spasms of classical expression. Healey isn’t exactly built like a sylph or swan, but he has mastered ballerina mannerisms so perfectly that he is both funny and endearing at such moments, as if he and the others all yearned to escape their bodies, their personalities and their world into the timeless purity that ballet has come to represent.

Marie does escape. And for everyone else (relentlessly fish-diving in the last ensemble), there’s always next Christmas.

* Performances of “The Hard Nut” continue Wednesday-Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. in Zellerbach Hall, Bancroft Way at Telegraph Avenue, UC Berkeley. $34-$52. (510) 642-9988.