Holiday Snowstorm Nutcracker Bonus!                               

As a seasonal bonus, we’re offering Chapter 22, “Where Snowflakes Swear,” for your Web reading pleasure. Happy holidays!

Sunday is a day off for the dancers, but in McCaw Hall it’s the busiest day of the year for the year’s biggest crew. Official load-in day is when the special floor and costumes and props move from Phelps Center to McCaw Hall. Though much of the scenery is already hanging in the flies or sitting in the wings from the partial load-in earlier in the week, more arrives from the warehouse, and there’s still plenty left to do with what’s already on the scene.

The front of the balcony gets the lights needed to illuminate the prologue that takes place in front of the proscenium and special fearsome nutcracker-jaws curtain. Those jaws are held by a metal truss that allows them to open up and reveal a mini-stage, and tall master carpenter Murray Johnson impassively supervises the crew in assembling all that. Backstage are mouse set pieces and horse costumes and what the stagehands call the “rocket sled”—the set for Clara’s bedroom that appears near the start of the show and must vanish in an instant under the musclepower of three stagehands who push it offstage as fast as its wheels and their legs can travel.

Despite all the action onstage, Rico Chiarelli trusts his team sufficiently to spend the morning in his office near the green room working on a computer to begin designing a set for next fall’s Twyla Tharp piece. The simple set, inspired by the pre-surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, is supposed to have a forced perspective, and for some reason, the AutoCAD software isn’t giving it to him. Chiarelli has been using computer-aided design exclusively for half a decade, and he begins to dope out the problem.

That’s when Murray comes in for a consultation. Some swags in the set, he says, don’t seem to be lining up properly against the cutouts in the big drops. Rico joins him for a look. Stagehands ride the Genie lift to take measurements, which reveal that Johnson’s eyeballs were correct: Two of the drops have been swapped left and right. As crewmen are dispatched to rectify the error, veteran flyman Don Ferguson discovers separately that one of the lines is out of balance, making it hard to raise and lower properly. “I’m going to go up there and throw another pill on it,” he says, meaning head to the arbor deck several flights up and add a thirty-pound counterweight that most of his younger counterparts call a “brick.”

Ballet moves fast, Gary Hess observes. “Opera and ballet are like oil and water. Everybody in opera has an assistant, or two assistants. They’ll take three weeks to tech a show. We take a day and a half.”

Prop master Peter Gantt heads out to the loading dock to spray-paint a moustache on the big Nutcracker. Nearby, two horses’ Lexan innards are being repaired. Official yellow swords and spears roll out to replace the white ones used for rehearsal.

Onstage, a socket wrench drops from the hands of somebody way up on a Genie lift and bounces on the floor with a clank. “Nobody dead,” reports a gray-mustachioed crew member directly below. Hard hats are unknown here; competence, teamwork, and luck serve in lieu of protective headgear.

Two crew members “float” a metal-backed panel to the floor, creating a mini-windstorm. “Cool breeze,” says somebody on the rail. Then the panel gets raised to where it can be attached to the truss superstructure.

Electricians place heat protectors in front of the footlights to help make their colored gels last longer. Even so, the Nut will go through about three sets of the fragile gels by the end of the run.

Tall electrician Bob Breeden fiddles with one of the Nut’s new cannons. In the past, says master electrician Dante Leonardi, they used real pyrotechnics. But once upon a time his federal pyrotechnic license cost $25 and was easy to renew. Now, thanks to the War on Terror, it’s $500 and requires filling out a fifty-page form. Plus you need a fire marshal at every performance—and sometimes they don’t bother to show up until twenty minutes after the effect. So this year the cannons are basically amplified MP3 players with recordings of cannon shots that will emerge from horn speakers in the cannons’ long snouts.

Fire one! Ka-boom! Bob shakes his head. The cannons aren’t loud enough. They’ll work on it.

On the arbor deck where the counterweights live way above the stage, I get a history lesson. Follow-spot operator Jon Hackett and lighting technician Gary Hess explain that theatrical rigging essentially derives from the nautical world. It was more so in the era when sets hung directly from hemp ropes instead of today’s steel cables, but even today the theater still uses ropes held with what look like nautical knots.

Down below, the crew begins rolling up the gray Marley floor from Upper Room. Once it’s departed, out comes “the carpet,” rolls of specially painted Nutcracker Marley just arrived from Phelps Center. A stagehand walks the first roll along the wooden floor, and once that’s finished, continues with the next one.

Using shoelace-like knots, others are tying drops, then snow bags, onto pipes. Footlights get firmly attached to the stage. Parts of the expanding tree, famously designed by engineers at local aerospace titan Boeing, get wrenched together. At the rail, cards begin to note what each rope is attached to: chandelier, drawing room border, #2 snow portal, snow bag, Johnny Rat.

The front truss gets its own counterweight system: a quartet of ropes each attached to two sandbag counterweights, a sort of miniature return to the simpler olden days of theatrical rigging when the rope you pulled worked directly on the setpiece you were moving. Down in the orchestra pit, Jay Gosselin unpacks the all-important celesta, an instrument invented in 1886, just six years before Tchaikovsky made its bell-like tones the signature sound of his Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Onstage the expanding Christmas tree, now fully assembled, is collapsed into its closed position and raised into place.

After dinner break, Murray Johnson rides the Genie up between the flies to adjust turnbuckles on the truss support system. Out in the hall, Jon Hackett is up on the balcony rail aiming lights, adjusting their shutters one by one and adding diffusion and gels. There are still wrinkles on the front drop, but those will soon be tweaked out of existence. Hess says it’s good that they have the same people working on this year to year, because they remember what they did. Otherwise, the process would be agonizing.

The Sunday workday began at eight in the morning. When it ends around ten at night, there’s plenty left to be done. On not much sleep. When Monday’s schedule begins at eight again, more lights get placed, aimed, and focused. Rico Chiarelli begins work on the lighting cues. By late afternoon, the team is ready for a tech rehearsal mainly for the timing of moving sets and props, of which there are plenty.

“In this show, there are huge pieces of scenery that are moving extremely fast. And that calls for some steely nerves, even amongst the dancers,” says Gary Hess. “When something’s moving and you’re moving too, it’s very difficult to judge everything, unless you know that that thing’s going to go straight and then turn and you’ve got so much time.”

So the crew works out the moving parts with the stage managers, who call their cues over the headsets. At one point Rico shouts from the hall to make sure the crew remains unseen when they move the rolling periaktoi and, later, the giant jack-in-the-box. When they’ve got that down, they move on to time the appearances of Johnny Rat and the growing Christmas tree.

 

“This is my domain,” says parent coordinator Di Anna Kurriger in a big space downstairs that serves as one of the girls’ dressing rooms. “Taking care of getting ’em upstairs and down. Throwing up. Broken arms; we’ve had two broken arms. One was a Clara running too close to the clock legs when they start to swing. Got hit. Last year the other Clara and the box that kind of moves on its own. She bounced off it and landed wrong.”

Kurriger originally got involved when her daughter was taking courses at PNB’s school, an hour’s drive from her Tacoma home. “My daughter was coming up here and I was spending about twenty to twenty-five hours a week up here since I wasn’t going to drive back, so I was volunteering. I was marking the L&I charts, keeping up with union rates, taking in audition requests for the company and categorizing them. I’ve even painted the weight room.”

When her Nutcracker predecessor decided to retire from the job, the Stowells’ assistant suggested she give it a try. “It was basically learn by the seat of your pants. . . . And I have to say Larae and all the costume people, they were remarkably wonderful. I didn’t even know how to put the costumes on.”

She learned fast. Now, in her fourth year, she knows it all by heart. “They put their costumes on after makeup but before lipstick. We have to do that, then correct their hair. Then they put their costume on, then their hat, then their lipstick. The dressers hand out everything. They assist if the parent has a question. Are all the tassels on the hat going to the left or the right? They all have to be the same. Once we set it, it’s set. So they answer the questions. They get the costume back to get cleaned. If lipstick gets smooshed on a shoulder, they’ll take them back to get it spot-cleaned. My dressers mainly hand out and collect. My parents snap and finish up.”

Kurriger now gets paid for what was once volunteer work, but the pay is “pretty minimal.” She starts an hour and a half before each show, when the first kids are due to arrive, and she’s on the scene for five hours on one-performance days, a lot longer when there are two. She manages notebooks of call sheets, cast lists, agreement forms, and contact lists with phone numbers, medical needs, allergies. The worst day, she knows, will be this Wednesday, with two dress rehearsals and lots of new help. “I’m training runners, I’m training parents how to do the makeup lines, the kids how to do the makeup lines, then to get dressed with the dressers, so the dressers are kind of learning too. Plus I’m coordinating with the artistic staff to get them to the stage on time, and making sure that the kids in the audience are keeping quiet.

“I need to be all over the theater. I need to be in the theater seats, on the theater stage, and I need to be down here” in the dressing rooms. “You’ll see me come and go, come and go, come and go. I do a lot of standing around too, which is taking them up, making sure they’re there, making sure they’re quiet, letting them go, bringing them down” from the stage to the dressing rooms. “You have to count ’em. We have had a kid get lost on the way up. . . . So because of that, I have a runner in the front and a runner in the back.

“My other job is the hardest job, keeping everybody mellowed out and getting along. Because you do have some stage mothers, and then you have some who are really hard workers, and it’s ‘Why isn’t this parent doing anything?’ The dynamics change every year, because you have some who are more in people’s faces, and then you’ve got the parent who wants to take five billion photos and never does anything else.” As far as Kurriger’s concerned, “if you want to be down here, you have to volunteer, and you have to do something, too.”

Ultimately, she says, “It’s a lot of fun, and the kids are a hoot. . . . Some of ’em make great friendships that last a lifetime.” And some get bored. This year, she expects the new TVs with a feed of the performance will help with that. “But a lot of ’em will bring in portable DVD players, so they’ll watch a movie. Homework is a big thing. Card games. They do the weirdest things.”

 

Today the dancers’ schedule shifts wildly, with company class at three-fifteen in studio C and rehearsal in McCaw Hall at five. Spacing is the order of the day, and much of the scenery is onstage to help with that. So Anne Dabrowski spends the first hour with two separate corps groups on Snow. Then they switch sets, and Dabrowski spends the six o’clock hour on Flowers, complete with two Floras, Lesley Rausch and Rebecca Johnston. All the while, Rico Chiarelli mans the tech table, adjusting light cues.

Two self-caricatures of Maurice Sendak emerge at the top left and right of the frame for the second act as it descends. It stays in place for the seven o’clock rehearsal of the grand pas de deux and finale with various grown-up Claras and Princes. Though they all get notes, the five couples look routinely beautiful, yet, thanks to the dancers’ personal styles, unique. The sixth, Lucien and Noe, doesn’t go all out, particularly on jumps, because this adult Clara is suffering from a mild injury.

Then it’s time for the rest of Act II. This rehearsal requires the follow-spot operators, so Jon Hackett rides the backstage elevator to the fifth floor, climbs red metal ladders, prowls across catwalks between the auditorium’s ceiling and the building’s roof, and ends up in a booth at the highest part of the rear of the hall. It may be cool outdoors, but it’s almost hot up here.

PNB’s follow spots usually come from a bridge much nearer the stage, but the angle of the lights there is too steep to reach behind the special frames this show uses. In this alternate booth at the very top rear of the hall, Hackett has his light rigged so he can sit on one high chair and put his feet up on another. One hand controls the spotlight’s iris, which brightens or darkens the output; the other moves the big light, which is counterbalanced but has a tendency to “swim” into position.

To help him pick up dancers onstage, Hackett’s light has a red target aiming device adapted from telescope technology. The second light, operated tonight by Jim Austin, uses a different sight that has the operator keep two rings in alignment. It’s tricky, and the last bastion of pure humanity in the otherwise computer-dominated world of light.

The dance begins, and Jill Hanson calls cues. Over the headset, Hackett gets a cue for DFI—Down Fade Intensity, officially, or, as Hackett initially puts it when asked for explanation, “Dick Face Intensity” or “Dumb Fuck Intensity.” It means to choke off some of the illumination “when a guy is standing around not worthy of a light.”

It’s a lonely job. There’s nothing much up here but the spotlights, the chairs, a couple of tables, and the chatter of the headsets. “We miss all the fun up here,” Hackett says. “We are stuck.”

 

For the next two days, leading up to Thanksgiving, the dancers’ schedules get even more intense. Schedules, plural: one for the professionals and older students, one for the kids. Onstage, it’s kids only from noon till two, as Neubert puts them through their paces in Chinese and Toy Theater and the opening of Act II. Backstage is a flurry of activity as stagehands work on tasks as mundane as organizing the Chinese lanterns in a rack and as urgent as fixing the feeble cannons. Downstairs, the wardrobe department consults color-coded charts that show which costume goes on which dancer—chosen, to some extent, by seniority. Across the way at Phelps Center after company class, Anne Dabrowski separately rehearses a few company members who don’t know their solos yet.

At two, the kids onstage give way to the principals. This hour is devoted to Clara and the Prince, and Kent Stowell is here to instruct. The women are wearing tutus today, adding to the grandeur of the grand pas, and one couple after another performs grandly and gets relatively few notes. A huge jump from Carrie Imler evokes a huge “Whoa!” from her colleagues and a round of applause at the end. “Carrie’s wearing a parachute!” cries a fellow principal.

There’s just a piano in the pit, but Stewart Kershaw watches and is eventually joined by Ian Eisendrath, who will conduct five performances this year. A Seattle Times story this morning explores Kershaw’s Nutcracker career here and in Stuttgart, Paris, New York and elsewhere—about 650 performances in all, 554 of them at PNB, to the point where he hasn’t needed the printed score in a quarter century. He calls the score “a masterpiece,” but admits that after a couple of weeks, “we’re all on autopilot. You find your mind wandering” and having to “concentrate on concentrating.”

Company newcomers Seth Orza and Miranda Weese run the big duo, but at one point they stop. “I was on the wrong side,” Orza says, and Stowell gives them some notes before they can proceed. But when they get going again, their big lift fails. “Shit,” Weese says. “Was I doing something different?”

The mood is easy but professional. In the wings and on the apron, dancers observe the performance and discuss technical details of their parts. In the hall, kids and a few parents begin turning up in the seats.

Backstage Olivier Wevers borrows Jodie Thomas to show the official way for the Prince to bring Clara down from one lift, a matter of being turned out and working toward one knee. Looks great, somebody pipes up. Wevers says actually it’s really hard, so he and everybody else get rid of the girl first.

Time for Snow Pas. Everybody’s in a hurry to try it before time runs out. Jonathan Porretta and Kaori Nakamura go first. “Good,” says Kent. “Very good. Very nice.”

“Next!” shout a bunch of dancers in unison. They know the union-mandated cutoff is fast approaching.

Stanko Milov and Carla Körbes take the stage with just six minutes left. “Stanko, just go from her waking up,” Stowell says.

As the dancers set themselves, somebody in the wings shouts, “Everybody wants to do it!”

“Get this party started!” says Stowell. “Dianne, just play.”

After this run, Stowell has notes for Carla. “No notes!” somebody cries from the wings. There’s just enough time for one more run. “If anybody wants to do it, go behind,” Stowell says. Anton Pankevich and Jodie Thomas toss off their warm-up clothes and go for it along with Batkhurel Bold and Carla Körbes behind Lucien Postlewaite and Noelani Pantastico.

“Okay! All right! Good!” Stowell proclaims. “Five!”

Next up: The first Nutcracker dress rehearsal of the season, Act II for cast C. A crowd quickly clots up the stage right wings. One PD boy bursts through, demanding “Where’s my dolphin?” A prop man points him to a marine mammal on a stick leaning against the wall; the PD grabs it and heads for his spot onstage behind the wave machine. When the curtain rises, a crew member in a downstage left wing slowly pays out the long Sendakian traveling curtain (complete with Wild Thing) that, as Murray Johnson gathers it in stage right, produces the motion effect of an ocean voyage behind the ship that opens the second act.

Sidelights filter into the stage right wings as they begin to fill with living tableaus. The Flowers in their romantic tutus inhabit a work by Degas. The ones in the Moors’ tasseled caps create a semblance of Vermeer. Across the way in the much more spacious stage left area, dancers warm up at portable barres, and stagehands who know from long experience how much time they’ll have on their hands during this act take advantage of the long wait for scene changes in Act II. One watches a DVD on a PC with headphones; another has his PC plugged into an Ethernet port and surfs the Web. In a break room, others read books and magazines and work on crossword puzzles. Out in the cargo dock, one guy chips golf balls into a big net.

Onstage, the dancers respond to Kent Stowell’s notes over the God mike: “Get higher. . . . Push off each other. . . . More assurance!”

After a break to reset the stage, it’s time for a dress run of the Fight Scene. Lots of kids end up in the stage left loading area, including a cavalry with newly rebuilt horse costumes hanging from their shoulders. Stagehands brace themselves for the most action they’ll see in the show. A lot happens behind the scenes in the Fight Scene, and in this rehearsal, it will happen over and over.

The three-sided columns known as periaktoi move in and turn. The grandfather clock descends from the heavens, and its legs go wild. The Christmas tree grows. The Jack in the Box appears, pops up, retreats. Johnny Rat drops in stage left, and his tail appears stage right. Stagehands are suddenly everywhere. Not to mention kids in mouse heads, horses, and uniforms, along with company dancers and PDs leading the fight.

Stowell gives notes. They run the scene again. And again. And again. “The rat stuff was not so good,” Stowell says. “There were rats wandering around not knowing what was happening.”

The stagehands ready the set for another try. They collapse the tree one more time, raise the grandfather clock, move the periaktoi in retreat. The fight scene is ready for its fifth go-round. And, by six o’clock, gets better.

After a half-hour break, there’s a bit of urgency. In the wings, Maria Chapman tells Peter Boal she pulled her groin and can’t dance, so Lesley Rausch gets the call to replace her as Flora. Then dress rehearsal begins for the Act I party scene. The two Young Claras from the other casts watch the prologue action (which takes place in front of the curtain) on the stage left TV monitor. When the curtain goes up, they move to the wings to peer directly at Clara’s bedroom. But Sandy Barrack, overseeing this side of the stage, has to move them back just before three strong, fast stagehands zoom the “rocket sled” right through the spot where they were standing.

On the headsets, there’s lots of backchat about party-scene supernumeraries like local weatherman Steve Pool and a Seattle Sonics cheerleader, which segues into gallows humor about the likelihood that the basketball team will decamp for Oklahoma City. Somebody makes fun of a grandfather who’s wearing a fanny pack. Somebody else recalls that “at Ballet Tacoma, the women were noticeable for, I’ll say this subtly, big tits.”

After the Masque, Kent’s God mike says, “We got a little spread out. . . . And in that one part, twist it, really twist it.” A dancer tries to obey. “More.” The dancer does it. “Okay.” Stowell talks to Boal about the precise moment that the sword should be plunged into the Nutcracker. That settled, he heads for the stage.

On the headsets, somebody says Anne Dabrowski looks unhappy. Somebody else thinks she’ll cheer up when she learns how few minutes are left tonight.

The plan is to cut off the rehearsal at nine, wherever they are, so Stowell skips the Masque and says, “Let’s get to the end of this.” They move forward with the section where Clara receives the Nutcracker doll from Drosselmeier. But they haven’t quite finished the scene when the console clock ticks over to nine and Jill Hanson terminates the rehearsal.

 

The next day is Thanksgiving Eve, the two-dress-rehearsal day that Di Anna Kurriger has come to dread. At least the wardrobe department is totally ready for the campaign. In the theater’s basement corridors, rolling wooden carts with shelves hold “Mom hair,” “Frau hair,” “Pirlipat hair,” and hats for everybody from Moors to the Peacock. Cages of shoes in pink, purple, black, and green are carefully arranged and labeled. Rows of rolling chrome racks hold girls’ dresses for the Party Scene and military garb for the Fight. Gauzy blue-white Snow tutus on hangers face off against blue-pink Flower tutus across the corridor. The show is almost ready to go on.

Over in Phelps Center, the dancers’ bulletin board has a new posting, a graph labeled NUTCRACKER, Dec. 2007 Single Ticket $$ Sales. Highlighted in green are today’s date, Wednesday Nov. 21st., and the figure $3,296,124. In red ballpoint is a message: Dear Dancers, We will totally blow through the ‘Opening Day’ revenue goal!!$$ Happy Thanksgiving, Marketing.

At McCaw Hall, Kent Stowell arrives for the two o’clock rehearsal, and Jordan Pacitti steps out in the Drosselmeier costume. With false nose, grayish makeup, and dark eyepatch (semi-transparent, so he doesn’t lose all depth perception), he looks properly like an old man. But he complains about the heaviness of the coat he has to wear.

The overture begins. In the audience, kids waiting for their cast to be called are wildly attentive to what’s happening onstage. The Act I rehearsal goes well, but just after the Snow scene begins, Stowell grabs the God mike. “Okay, stop. What happened, ladies? The train leaves on time.”

“They’re really late,” Anne Dabrowski agrees.

Stowell gets up and heads down to the pit, leans over and says something to the conductor. Then he comes back and restarts the scene. As it continues, Kent tells Anne that one of the girls isn’t doing her arms the same as everybody else.

But it’s amazing how much better it looks now that the costumes, sets, and lighting are in place. “Ladies, soft shoes,” says Stowell. “Otherwise it gets a little too noisy.”

Out in the green room, three dancers work on picture puzzles. Another stretches on the floor. One knits a legwarmer.

Onstage, Act II begins. “You’re late, dolphins,” barks the Voice of God as the ship “moves” across the hand-roiled seas. “Up, up!”

Over the headsets Toby asks Jill why she gasped at last night’s rehearsal. She says it’s because the Jack in the Box got overenthusiastic and went too far downstage, forcing young Clara off the Marley and onto the black apron in front of the pit. Fortunately, she stopped there.

At the tech table, Stowell isn’t overjoyed with the Moors: “Rough day, huh?” says the God mike. He’s happier with Toy Theater. “Good job, kids. Remember there’s music at the end there.”

As the rehearsal continues, Rico Chiarelli keeps tweaking light cues. At a break in his commands, Jill wonders via the headset “Some of the students are asking why we changed the cannons. Can we give them a simple answer?”

“Tell them it’s none of their fucking business,” Chiarelli says cheerfully.

The rehearsal continues. The headsets are more or less silent for a while. Then somebody says, “Hey, you know what time it is? Coda!” Some weary “Yay!” replies follow. To some veterans, Nutcracker already feels like a chore.

Kent resets the end of the finale with Weese, who missed her entrance. Afterward, he gives her some instructions about positioning and remarks, “We hate squashed Claras.”

There’s a break to reset the sets. After refilling the snow bags with recently-swept-up fireproof confetti in plastic trash bags, stagehand Pete Olds “cleans the snow” by sweeping a powerful brick-sized magnet along the length of the bags. What comes out? Lots of bobby pins and a large bent nail of the sort that’s used for hinges on sets. Nails from shoes often turn up too, says Olds. And once he found a peanut some of his colleagues glued together with metal inside as a prank.

The kids are right about the cannons. They fire, but only sometimes, and they still aren’t loud enough. Clad as always in shorts, big Bob Breeden attacks one with a voltmeter. With a bit of trial and error, he manages to dope out what’s wrong.

Downstairs, kids are getting ready for their moment on the stage. In the girls’ dressing rooms, rollers and hairnets are the order of the day. In the boys’ dressing room, backpacks and clothes clutter the tables, costumes hang on racks, and several young dancers play a game of “sushi cards.”

It’s time for makeup. Foundation goes on with sponges, then blush with a brush, as administered by Alan Alabastro, a dad with lots of dancers in this production. Dante Alabastro and his younger brother Andre are awaiting their turns at the makeup table when their sister Roxanne appears at the door. She’s eight and says it’s her first Nutcracker. She’s a baby mouse, but insists she’s not nervous. Like her brothers, she’s been on stage before.

Di Anna’s runner for this room is fifteen-year-old Brendan Philip. He’s dark and handsome and has been taking lessons at PNB for ten years. He was considering becoming a professional dancer, but being out nine months with Achilles tendinitis has kind of put a damper on it.

Upstairs, Rico Chiarelli gives some donors a backstage tour. In the pit, Stewart Kershaw rehearses the singers in the Tchaikovsky-Mozart and their brief “ah-ah-ah” part in the Snow scene. At four-thirty the stage is basically empty of sets, but twenty minutes later, everything’s in place again for a dress rehearsal of Act I, complete with the supernumeraries, many of them veterans of ten or fifteen years’ standing, who play the grandmothers, grandfathers and drunken uncle in the Party Scene. Kershaw takes the orchestra through the overture twice. The first time, for some reason, light cues were missing from the special Nutcracker curtain. But now they’re on, and the show is running.

There’s less banter on the headset for this rehearsal; by now, everybody’s kind of punchy. But the talk perks up when Jill mentions having trouble finding the essential Trivial Pursuit cards for headset play during future performances. She’s found some with a Christmas theme, but everybody agrees that seems kind of lame.

Stage right fills up with the Fight Scene cast. Lots of stagehands appear at the rail. Dante Leonardi inspects the cannons. Jill Hanson calls for the clock to come down faster than it did last time. Rail hands hold the clock tight so the clock kickers can do their stuff. Lots of calls from Hanson bring in, then get rid of, items on the stage. In the pit, Stewart Kershaw sings along with the orchestra. There’s applause from the rail as the Christmas tree grows to its full size and lights up. Hanson busily makes one call after another. The Snowflakes arrive backstage in their soft blue tutus. The rail guys approve.

Here come the cannons and the small artillery! Jeff Stebbins, who thanks to longstanding tradition here also answers to “Bruno,” grabs the rat tail from the wall. Kids in uniforms roll the cannons onto the stage. They fire. They fire again. “Rat on and lights 36,” says Jill. “Standby Jack and Rat off.” As Johnny Rat disappears from the other side of the stage, Jeff/Bruno drags the tail from this one.

At the end of the Snow scene, the lead Snowflake stumbles, and Kent barks, “We’ll fix that!” over the God mike. The called-out dancer gestures disgustedly with her hands and, as she heads into the wings, shouts “Fuck!” A moment later, she bursts into tears.

Once the finale ends, Stowell comes up with words of approval for Carla Körbes as Clara. Then he gives the frazzled chief Snowflake some notes, ending with “Nice job.” She replies with a forced smile and an icy “Thank you,” and walks off. Then Stowell decides he has one more correction for Milov and Körbes and has the orchestra play the music for them to fix it.

Afterward, Peter Boal reassures the distraught Snowflake in a sweet, positive way. When she explains what happened—a collision with another dancer that was the other dancer’s fault—he tells her it won’t happen again and emphasizes how strong she looked in the piece.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” rings out among the cast. Fifteen minutes later, the crew has the Act II sets stowed in the flies and loading area. The stage is bare.

 

The day after Thanksgiving features the matinee that will kick off Nutcracker season. But as always, company class comes first, once again onstage. In the wings, a table holds a collection of homemade chocolate and coconut balls that Carla Körbes calls a Brazilian holiday tradition. On a crowded stage, PDs take class with the company, and by quarter after one, class is finished. Most of the dancers drift out to the dressing rooms, but after class Christina Siemens plays the grand pas music for Olivier Wevers and Louise Nadeau, and Lucien Postlewaite and Noelani Pantastico practice behind them. They won’t be performing until tonight and tomorrow, respectively. Kaori Nakamura and Jonathan Porretta have the leads for today’s matinee.

By one-thirty the dancers have disappeared. The main curtain comes down, and stagehands swarm the area. Mops attack the floor. At the rail, flyman Al Hiskey and his colleagues bring set elements down from the heights. Across the stage, crew members roll the periaktoi and rocket-sled bed into place. Onstage, Jill Hanson and Dante Leonardi have rouge-cheeked kids test the latest iteration of the cannons.

It’s a cold, clear Seattle day, and out in the bright glassed-in lobby, parents in business suits, Mariners jackets, and Gore-Tex mix with young kids in dress-up clothes and teens in jeans. Eight-foot-tall figures of the Nutcracker, the Mouse King, and Drosselmeier attract parents with cameras. A Seattle Times table offers Nutcracker dolls as a premium for new subscriptions. Big display cases feature costumes from the company’s next family-friendly production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A photo booth offers pictures with a person in a Nutcracker costume against a festive holiday backdrop. Via her headset, Jill Hanson tells John Tangeman “The house is yours.” Ushers open the doors, and early arrivals begin to head toward their seats.

Down in the musicians’ lounge, across from a rack of personal coffee vessels, one of several bulletin boards bears an elaborate printed spreadsheet with Nutcracker musicians’ schedule. One brave violist is the only musician signed up for all forty-four performances, including dress rehearsal, but a few others have opted for almost all the shows; the majority of players have taken on thirty-five or so.

Which is probably why a green page below them states that “Nutcracker is long. Life is short. We might as well have fun.” Since “there also happen to be 26 working days for Nutcracker this year, one for every letter of the alphabet,” the sheet outlines bringing “food or libation beginning with the featured letter to share” and delegates the job to a different section of the orchestra each day. The clarinets and bassoons get a combination of Q, X and Z on December 21, which leaves room for a “Russian Day” featuring a letter in Cyrillic.

The sheet also notes that “Rumor has it that our beloved (ahem!) maestro is penning his memoirs” and offers a set of “ACTUAL INSTRUCTIONS TO THE ORCHESTRA FROM PROFESSIONAL CONDUCTORS.” It includes “Imagine you’re getting enough money for what you do,” “You’re all wondering what speed it’s going to go. Well, so am I,” and “Play as if you were musicians.”

Behind the curtain, dancers mill about in the Party Scene drawing room behind the rocket sled. Uko Gorter, the veteran Drosselmeier, strolls about in his heavy cloak and colossal fake nose. Yesterday’s number one Snowflake (and now today’s) looks teary as she talks in the wings with Boal, who tries to smooth things over, make her comfortable.

Supernumeraries for the party scene filter onstage in their period costumes. Excited kids arrive stage left, moving a little too quickly for Larae Hascall. “You guys walk,” she tells them tartly.

“I like your nose,” one mischievous lad tells Gorter.

Dressed in his classic tails, Stewart Kershaw comes onstage to chat with the dancers. Paul Gibson and Otto Neubert look after the placement of the kids onstage, and Neubert gives them a low-key pep talk.

“House to half. Go!” says Hanson into her headset, and the lights dim in the auditorium. She makes the turn-off-your-cellphones announcement over the public address system. Kershaw enters the pit, ascends the podium, picks up his baton, and sends the orchestra into the overture.

“No Trivial Pursuit opening day,” Hanson says. Just behind her, two stagehands get ready to pull on special ropes that will reveal the bed. A prop man stands by with a platter of glasses for the party.

Anne Dabrowski watches from stage left. In the opposite wing, Otto Neubert mutters, “Forty-two shows. Eighty-four hours. Five thousand, two hundred minutes left.” Gorter blows his real nose. Hanson chats with the headset crew about a last minute pumpkin-pie issue at her Thanksgiving dinner.

And then they’re off. The rocket sled zooms. The party is a success. Clara’s nightmare begins. The clock kicks wildly. The stagehands applaud the expanded and lighted Christmas tree, and the audience’s applause drowns them out. Johnny Rat and his tail menace poor Clara. She prevails. After finishing the Snow duo with Kaori Nakamura, Jonathan Porretta groans “It was soooo slow.” And one human Snowflake peels a couple of salty fireproof inanimate ones from her tongue and cries “Fuck!”

The curtain comes down, and applause rings in through the speakers. There are no bows in this act, so dancers head to the dressing rooms. Out in the green room, Paul Gibson inevitably works on scheduling.

“This is our ‘best’ cast,” Anne Dabrowski sighs. It’s chockablock with professional corps members rather than PDs. “It will never be seen again.” That’s because in the coming weeks a lot of the pros will be sucked up into rehearsals: Nasha Thomas-Schmitt will be returning to move ahead with Vespers, and Susan Stroman will be arriving to create her new piece.

Soon the boat sets sail for Act II. Nakamura and Porretta descend into the backstage dimness with the help of a stagehand’s flashlight, and the rest of the act unfolds without unpleasant incident. For now, all’s well with the Nut.

 

Half an hour after the first-show curtain descends, there’s action upstairs in the Allen Room, named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. During the regular season, that space serves as the donor lounge, but now it houses the rehearsal for tomorrow’s Nutcracker Brunch, a long PNB tradition spearheaded by a group of volunteers. The Nut Brunch is the Nut in a nutshell for really little kids, performed on a portable parquet dance floor rather than official Marley. Unlike the company dancers, PDs have no contract clauses protecting them from substandard materials underfoot or a lack of rest between performances, so they’re the ones who will rehearse now and perform tomorrow.

Don Vollema’s piano stands in for the orchestra. Louise Nadeau, narrator for the event, settles down on a high bar chair. Lots of little Nutcracker cast members are in the room to watch, along with Larae Hascall, who observes the scene in order to find out what costumes she’ll have to drag out from wardrobe.

And Tim Lynch, former company member and current teacher, becomes Instant Choreographer. Nadeau reads a section of the narrative, and Lynch sets steps on the relevant dancers. Dance, read, repeat. For the finale, he has the dancers encircle Clara and walk offstage, which here means a hallway directly behind one end of the dance floor.

Hascall says this is the first time she can remember doing the Nut Brunch on the hectic opening weekend of the run. Still, it’s better than the old days, when they did it in the Olympic Hotel downtown and they had to wrestle wardrobe crates out and back. Here, at least, the costumes are on the premises.

Downstairs, a new cast of kids arrives for makeup and costumes for the evening performance. Onstage, Toby Basiliko and Jill Hanson work on the cannon, testing a variety of sounds uploaded to the internal MP3 players. Looking on from the pit, Kershaw gives a big thumbs up to a bass-heavy boom. “That’s a good one!”

On his podium, stuffed animals accompany him during Nut season. A bear draped in the American flag is a refugee from his citizenship ceremony. There’s also a conducting gorilla. And they’re in good company. During Nutcracker, Christmas lights adorn many music stands, and amid traditional pinpoints, lighted lobsters, crabs and seahorses crest one stand, lit-up kitties another. Plastic snowflakes gussy up the singers’ mikes; stage left, there’s a whole Christmas tree.

The winds arrive early and begin practicing. The strings file in a few minutes before showtime. And when the orchestra tunes, you realize there’s a reason the orchestra offers sound-reducing earplugs: It gets loud down here.

The matinee officially starts at two, but the clock shows seven minutes past when Jill Hanson contacts the orchestra manager on a special phone that “rings” by flashing a light. Conductor Kershaw makes his way through the orchestra, ascends the podium, gets his applause.

Marian McCaw, for whom the theater is named, is here tonight, somebody points out over the headsets. Then Hanson makes her first call and the overture begins for the second time today.

“She’s a faker,” says Jon Hackett over the headset from the follow-spot booth, and you can almost see his look of distaste. Jill explains that like some basketball stars, tonight’s new Young Clara tends to move her head one way but move her body the other. That doesn’t make it easy for a follow spot to keep up.

Down in the pit, the dancing just behind and above the musicians is utterly invisible to virtually all the players. And if for the first act, you happen to sit at the celesta, you will give a performance that is perfection provided you don’t touch the keys. The celesta is silent for the entire opening act.

Even if you have a role in that act, you may be able to disappear from time to time. Cued by a single glance from Kershaw, the harpist plays his first solo, and then disappears. He’s tacet—silent—until “Departure of the Guests,” and since the party will grind on awhile, he’s permitted by local tradition to go back to the musicians’ lounge and read or work on picture puzzles.

The one person in the pit privy to the onstage action is, of course, the conductor. He silences the band just in time for Drosselmeier’s big comic sneeze. Later a pizzicato ends with applause, and Kershaw nods approval at the orchestra’s intense togetherness.

During the “Mozart,” carried solely by Christina Siemens’ piano and three singers, Kershaw steps off the podium to blow his own nose, and one momentarily idle string player grabs a swig from his water bottle. Then Kershaw steps back onto the podium to bring the orchestra in for the finale of that section. After that’s over, Ryan Stewart, the new hornist hired at the fall audition, looks at his neighbor for approval and gets a nod and thumbs up.

It’s almost time for the guests to leave, and the harpist duly returns to his red, black, and silver strings. He’s actually doing double duty; the section is written for two harps, he notes, but for financial reasons it’s almost never played that way.

And then onstage come the Battle, the Snow, the intermission. In a hallway behind the pit, men and women in black spend the time discussing union stuff like work rules and pay for principals and assistants. Eventually they return to their places for Act II.

 

Saturday morning begins with the Nutcracker Brunch. While the company is busy at class onstage, dressed-up parents, grandparents, and little kids mingle in the downstairs lobby around the character statues, augmented today by face-painting tables, ballerinas in tutus, and dancers in Nutcracker, Mouse, and Peacock costumes. Eventually they all file up to the first-floor lobby, sit at tables decorated with Nutcracker centerpieces, and partake of a brunch that includes Teddy Bear Hot Cakes, organic orange juice, and hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows for the kids. The parents get quiche. Service today is somewhat out of kilter; some kids get their food right away, but those who don’t, seeing those who do, get extremely unhappy in their best-bib-and-tucker finery. Somehow everybody eventually gets fed, after which there’s a trek upstairs to the Allen room for the event.

The littlest kids are ushered to the floor directly in front of the parquet to give them a better look. Parents and bigger kids use chairs behind them. Nadeau, the only mom among PNB’s dancers, pours on the sugar and makes an excellent narrator. As the PDs come in with their fanciful costumes and sprightly tutus, she moves the story along so quickly there’s hardly time for the kids to get bored. The big hit is James Brougham’s roly-poly Chinese Tiger, which, as in the theater, gets huge cheers when the dancer pops up out of its clever body-hiding costume. Afterward, parents snap photos of their kids with the characters. Boys gravitate toward the Tiger and Attila, girls toward ballerinas in pointe shoes.

Parents and kids alike seem pleased. No tantrums have interrupted the music. Nobody has visibly thrown up. One more annual Nutcracker event is a great success.