Fireworks Finale Includes Earthbound ‘Nutcracker’

Mark Morris’ “Hard Nut” and Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” proved that startling narrative ploys can reinvigorate Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores and yield brilliant contemporary movement theater. So it’s possible that Kirk Peterson’s complex historical/ecological agenda for what he called “The American Nutcracker” might have paid off at its premiere by the Hartford Ballet last Christmas.

But we’ll never know. With the company’s radical downsizing and Peterson’s departure as artistic director earlier this year, the newly re-choreographed version of Act 2 that the Hartford dancers brought to Hollywood Bowl on Friday looked faceless and empty-headed. Using the distinctive Sandra Woodall costumes designed for Peterson’s production, company ballet master Stefan Hoff patched together a standard-issue regional “Nutcracker” scarcely worth importing: The Southland owns dozens just like it.

Nor did the dancers deliver more than dutiful classicism, marooned as they were on a narrow stretch of the Bowl forestage with conductor John Mauceri and the Bowl Orchestra jammed into the shell just behind them. Making the strongest impression (partly due to their unorthodox costumes and makeup): Laura Urgelles and Viktor Uygan in a lyric/gymnastic duet for what the program called a “Native American Shaman and Golden Eagle Spirit,” set to the Arabian Dance.

Denise Leetch Moore made a brittle Sugar Plum Fairy, Timothy Melady was a technically unreliable Nutcracker Prince and Kelly Leonardi and Ilia Gorev led the Waltz of the Flowers graciously, if occasionally seeming overtaxed by Mauceri’s brisk tempos.

Besides accompanying the dancers, Mauceri contributed typically energetic and shapeless readings of music used in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” with Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and Rossini’s overture to “William Tell” (an encore) less disfigured by arbitrary, disorienting speedups and slowdowns than the Bach/Stokowski Toccata and Fugue in D minor or the Mussorgsky/Rimsky-Korsakov “Night on Bald Mountain.”

As the climax of this “Fantasy Fireworks Finale,” Mauceri’s suitably bombastic interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche Slave” launched an adroitly timed and highly creative display of exploding rockets, flaming pinwheels and incandescent onion domes by PyroSpectaculars.