T
he Nutcracker ballet is an American holiday tradition up there with Santa, Coca-Cola, Stockings and Red Ryder BB Guns. Utah’s Ballet West, however, lays claim to being the “Home of America’s Oldest Nutcracker”™, so emphatically so that the company has trademarked the phrase. And, it also happens to be the most commonly known and beloved arrangement.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky debuted The Nutcracker in 1892; the music he composed was lauded, but the rest—the actual performance, choreography and staging—was widely considered a flop and was, well, what with the Bolshevik Revolution and two World Wars and all, forgotten.
Ballet West’s founder, Willam Christensen (Mr. C, as he is affectionately known), worked with George Balanchine, who introduced him to Tchaikovsky’s score.
“Mr. C spent an evening listening to the score with Balanchine and his Russian ballet mistress, who both carried childhood memories of the ballet,” relates Bruce Caldwell, Ballet West Rehearsal Director and Archivist. “The ballet mistress started showing him the steps, and the next year he did his first production.”
Christensen’s choreography and staging updated the ballet for a post-war audience hungry for a positive, comforting escape.
“Mr. C had a throwback sensibility,” he says. “It came from his vaudeville days, he knew an audience needed something to laugh about, something to cry about and something that would knock their socks off. His Nutcracker has warm family appeal, laughter and technical artistry.”
The company brought in more child dancers, who (as a bonus) brought their parents to performances. “Mr. C thought, ‘let’s bring the children, get the young dancers involved with their families’, and families involved the box office,” Bruce says. “He knew that if there were children in the show, the family would come.”
Bruce danced many of these roles as a child in the early years of the production. Now, each year between September and December, as The Nutcracker readies for another season, he can be found in rehearsal, guiding the newest crop of young performers. Every leap, turn and gesture is a living echo of Ballet West’s founder and of the ballet that journeyed from obscurity to its place as a treasured American holiday tradition.
Tickets for the 2025 season are available now.
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