BALLET: NUTCRACKER
The Dancers Company
Ford Theatre, Geelong
July 26
It was soon evident from the audience response that The Dancers Company is on to a winner in Leigh Rowles's version of the much-loved Nutcracker ballet.
Rowles's interpretation sticks largely with the traditional story of the Christmas party, the battle between the heroic nutcracker doll and the delectably naughty mice, and the fairytale dreamworld where Clara's doll turns into a handsome prince.
The Dancers Company consists of students in their final year at the Australian Ballet School. Members of the Australian Ballet Company dance the principal roles, but this ballet really belongs to the young dancers. The technical demands are well within the dancers' abilities. They make the highly codified and technically demanding ballet seem entirely natural. Their depth of interpretive ability is impressive.
Tim O'Donnell delivers the grandiose gestures of Drosselmeyer with fantastic timing, while the various soloists inject the appropriate pizazz in the Spanish, vigour in the Russian, and delicacy in the French sequences, adding to the formal beauty - surely one of the most attractive renditions of the traditional Waltz of the Flowers. Loredana Sachelaru and Brett Chynoweth delight as the young Clara and the Nutcracker Doll. Matthew Lawrence dances the Nutcracker Prince with clean precision, though he has a tendency to hold his back rather too rigidly. Amber Scott, as Clara, performs with a serene ease.
Unfortunately, the theatrical logic disappears in the showpiece dances for the principals: why is the stage suddenly deserted as the Prince and Clara launch into the familiar Sugar Plum and Princes variations; and why the sudden launch in to full scale romantic melodrama in the grands pas de deux, which clashes with the easy naturalness of the production?
From The Age