Buoyed up, weighed down: The Nutcracker at the ROH
The Nutcracker
Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House
Balcony D30 standing, £10
7 December 2018
ROH page
The emotional baggage from decades of Nutcrackering can buoy up or weigh down each fresh iteration. I’ll swoon from the music within the first ten seconds – but also teeter rapidly into disgruntlement if it doesn’t live up to my memories. This performance was more towards the latter. It’s still The Nutcracker, it’s still the Royal Ballet, it’s still delightful. But I t wasn’t the best ever.
That said, Yasmine Naghdi as the Sugar Plum transcended whatever humdrum there was around her. I remember her dancing the Rose Fairy in a cinema broadcast a few years ago, where she was perfection. Her Sugar Plum is the arrival of that trajectory: so graceful, such elegance, with the appearance of so much ease. The unflustered quality which I can find sometimes make her dramatic performances one-dimensional is here a triumph: Sugar Plum is pristine, assured, the star of the show and owed every honour. Naghdi glows.
Of the other principals, I always like Luca Acri and he is a fine Nutcracker, tight and neat and chirpy. Emma Maguire, I fear, has done Clara a few too many times; she dials it in, not even able to fake spontaneity. She was put in the shade by the eager School dancers around her, particularly the expressive Ptolemy Gidney as Fritz. Next to the disinterested was Christopher Saunders as a disappointingly irascible Drosselmeyer, no mysterious magician but instead a bossy ballet master in shoes too small. To make Drosselmeyer a curmudgeon is a legitimate approach, but with no wonderment coming from Clara it meant things fell flatter they they should.
The rest was a mixed bag. For Philip Mosley’s glorious grandfather, filling my heart in his eagerness to dance, there was a slightly too-fast transformation scene from conductor Barry Wordsworth, speeding over the climax with self-defeating haste. For the stern perfection of Itziar Mendizabal, Tomas Mock, Lukas Bjørneboe Brændsrød and Harry Churches in the Arabian Dance, there was the mismatch of Joseph Sissens and Marcelina Sambé in the Chinese Dance, individually excellent but not remotely together. For Yasmine Naghdi there was Ryoichi Hirano as the Prince, deigning us with his presence and not entirely sure it’s worth his while.
But still it’s The Nutcracker. I basically loved it to bits.
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