There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays

Is “The Nutcracker” still relevant in 1996? Gasp! How can you even ask?

“Are you kidding me?” asked dancer Patrick Simonello, astonished at the slightest doubt. Even adults, especially adults, he says, need to see the tale of a girl’s dreams of lifelike dolls, all the sweets she can eat and the most handsome prince in the land.

“It’s fantasy; it’s dreams,” Simonello said, “and basically, that’s what we’re living for. Aren’t you?”

Clearly, Simonello is, hence he’ll help re-create the holiday warhorse with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago at the Orange County Performing Arts Center today and Thursday through Sunday.

Dance Magazine reports this month that nearly 21,000 men and women performed “The Nutcracker” last year, giving life to a 19th century scenario that’s been replayed every year from sea to shining sea for five decades.

Like most of his contemporaries, Simonello, 22, already has danced the ballet more than a few times. Raised in Westminster, he cut his teeth five years ago with the Orange County Dance Center’s production in Huntington Beach. Still, not only does he continue to find the piece meaningful for pre-millennium audiences, but he also manages to find ways to make it his own.

The first time he danced the toy soldier, one of five parts he’ll dance here, he popped out of a giant gift box. “And automatically my mouth went into a little O, like I was surprised,” he said recently. “Everybody was laughing because no one had ever done that before.”

In the “Waltz of the Flowers,” he and his partner have created a secret little “subplot,” he said during a phone call from his apartment, an el-train ride away from the Joffrey’s Chicago home. As if to bid adieu, the two dancers glance back at each other after parting, then do an unchoreographed brise (airborne leg beat) before exiting from opposite ends of the stage.

“But don’t write that,” he joked. “They may make us take it out.”

On the contrary, thanks to the Joffrey’s diverse repertory and supportive management, Simonello said, he gets to express his individuality throughout the year.

“It feeds my soul,” he said.

In fact, he might have had the chance to dance in several other companies but wasn’t interested, said Simonello, who also will appear as the nutcracker doll and a high-flying Russian dancer as well as in the ballet’s blowy snow scene.

After starting with jazz at age 11, he took his first ballet classes as a senior at Marina High School in Huntington Beach. Smitten with the classical form and progressing rapidly, he performed his first “Nutcracker” that year.

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Soon after, he auditioned for several companies’ schools, winning full scholarships for summer study at the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, Pennsylvania and the Joffrey.

“Joffrey had the biggest name, and it was in New York,” he said, and, having a heavy jazz background, “I wanted to be on Broadway. Little did I know I’d be joining the company eventually.”

Eventually came after a stint with Tulsa Ballet Theatre, some “Nutcracker” performances with Los Angeles Classical Ballet and a year with the Joffrey II Dancers, the now-defunct apprentice company.

The moment he made it into the Joffrey sticks in his memory. It came during a Joffrey II rehearsal, when former director Jeremy Blanton interrupted to read a memo.

“It said, ‘To all, from [artistic director] Gerald Arpino. Please join me in congratulating Patrick Simonello on his promotion to the main company beginning May 24.’ Of course I remember the whole thing. I was, like, wow, I couldn’t believe it because they didn’t have an open space. There were 20 girls and 20 guys. I was 21.”

Dancing on Christmas Eve won’t be so bad this year, Simonello said, because his mother, a writer, will be in the audience. It would have been nice to have been based near his family, but career options in Orange County are nil, he said.

“This was my problem growing up,” he said. Even the county’s oldest, best-known troupe, Ballet Pacifica, still pre-professional, was never an option.

Artistic director Molly Lynch “is great, and I admire what she’s doing, but it’s still not to the scale she wants it either.”

What will it take to create a community that will support a high-level dance company that will keep aspiring dancers from defecting? Admittedly it’s a chicken-and-egg situation, but the answer is more exposure and education, Simonello said.

Audiences in the Windy City, thanks to the Joffrey and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, a resident modern troupe, have the appreciation and familiarity that’s needed here, he said.

“There’s this man who I’ve seen at our performances a lot. He’s been to ‘The Nutcracker’ so much, it kills me. And he’s a swimming coach, but he knows my name, and a lot of the dancers’ names, and he met my family when they came here, and when I see him, [he asks,] ‘How’s your mom?’

“The other day I went to the movies, and I saw some [Joffrey] board members, and they were so happy. They asked me to sit with them and took me to dinner and gave me a ride home. Even the cab drivers here know some of the dancers’ names. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

In Orange County, he added, “people don’t think of becoming professional dancers because they don’t see it enough.” In New York, the country’s dance capital, “kids can see it down the street. Not only can they go to performances easily, but they see the ballet schools and what goes into it.

“A friend of mine whom I studied with in Orange County would always say to me, ‘Oh, I just could never go into dancing professionally because then it would be my job and I’d end up hating it.’ Why can’t people be taught that if this is what they love to do, they do it for a job? The examples aren’t there.”

If the county can’t yet support a professional troupe, major companies must tour here every year, Simonello said.

“It would be a good start.”

* The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago dances “The Nutcracker” at 8 p.m. today and Thursday through Saturday, and at 2 p.m. Friday through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $18-$59. (714) 556-2122.