sarma

The New York City Ballet has its own way of making the darkest part of the year less bleak. Balanchine's Nutcracker is all about warmth and light and sweetness. It's also, to everyone's delight, about a Christmas tree that quadruples in size, about a battle between toy soldiers and huge gray mice who wring their paws in panic and scuttle off with their fat wobbling, about a white bed that swirls its occupant away to a distant country where everything and everyone is edible, but no one important get eaten because everyone's too polite.

But despite the silent noisiness (shh, you'll spoil the Tchaikovsky) and high spirits of the first-act Christmas party, the ballet has a lot to do with considerate behavior, with people noticing each others' needs. The little party dances that Balanchine has made, keeping in mind the skill of the real-children-dancers involved, are full of this. At one point the littlest boy has no partner, so his mother - without making a fuss - slips into the dance beside him; young fathers promenade their daughters; the grandparents sweetly and stiffly join in the final dance; the nephew of the mysterious Drosselmaier is always attentive to little Marie's problems with her nutcracker doll and her rowdy brother - which may be why she dreams him her champion in the mouse battle, her guide to a grown-up land of sophisticated dancing, and the prince with whom she flies away in a magical boat.

I love it all. Even the awkward or forced moments entertain me like the orderly jumps that the children execute in successive pairs when they first get a look at the Christmas tree; in a way, the whole first-act, except for the dances, has the quaint and cautious phrasing of an old storybook for children.

And then there's the snowflake scene Marie and her Cavalier pass through, with tons of fake snow failing from above and sixteen NYCB women in white leaping and swirling and rushing past each other. It's a wonderful dance - fairly simple in terms of steps (because of the slipperiness of the snow stuff), but turbulent in its patterns and sequence. Its speed and spaciousness make it an interesting passage from the enthusiastic, humanly flawed social behavior in the Stahlbaum parlor to the ideal manners at the court of the Sugar Plum Fairy, where every last candy cane knows his place and function and executes it beautifully.

The variations for all the limber comestibles are light and clever and brief enough to leave you with room for more. Who's to question why Tea is (has always been since Ivanov, I guess) a jolly Chinaman and two female companions who have this thing about pointing their fingers, while Coffee is a sexy harem girl on the loose (usually danced by Gloria Govrin with that light and marvelously unassuming voluptuousness that only she possesses).

The grandest dancing is reserved for the Sugar Plum Fairy, her Cavalier, and Dew Drop (I don't know how she got into the larder). On New York City Ballet's long-awaited opening night, Patricia McBride performed the Fairy's welcoming solo beautifully -suggesting in the easy, unaffected play of her head and shoulders, the soft clarity of her pointework, that decorum was liberating rather than confining, and something that made her intensely happy. In the pas de deux, she looked strained at times, as if we were seeing her from the wrong angle and she knew it. And d'Amboise stayed on the surface of the dancing - looking unsubstantial and oddly giddy. Gelsey Kirkland was the most ravishing Dew Drop I've seen. The clarity her small, thin body achieves in space, her demure head, the understated way in which she assaults difficult movements make you think you've seen her hang in the air - cool and sparkling - for seconds at a time. Audiences love the big, bounding dancers whose grinning assertiveness shows us how tough it is. (Like tenors, they take deep breaths before high notes.) But dancers like Kirkland provoke another kind of gasp - she achieves everything so effortlessly that we can't believe what we've just seen.

Maybe I like the Mouse King best because he looks so nonplussed - as if he's just woken up in time to be killed. Or maybe I like the tree growing, or the way Marie's mother doesn't mind her sneaking out of bed to sleep near the tree - just covers her up. Or maybe I like the snow. Or maybe...