The Nutcracker ballet has become an Estes holiday tradition

Ballet Boulder comes to The Stanley Hotel for three sold-out performances

Feature by Patti Brown

A Sugar Plum Fairy, waltzing flowers, a princely nutcracker, a young girl, magical mice, and a parade of exotic characters from Spain, Arabia, China, and Russia all make Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker a perennial holiday tradition.

The Boulder Ballet will perform excerpts from The Nutcracker Suite at The Stanely Hotel Saturday and Sunday in the Pavilion. The three scheduled performances are sold out.

This is the third year for the special performance on the unique stage which is framed by a glass wall and overlooks a background of boulders, live trees, and a pond of water.

The two-act classical ballet, written and first performed in 1892 in St. Petersburg, Russia, is an adaptation of The Story of a Nutcracker, by Alexandre Dumas written in 1844, and a retelling of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann’s 1816 novella, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

Before composing The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky had written The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. The former was hailed as a masterpiece; the latter received harsh reviews.

When the Nutcracker premiered, the reception was mixed. Tchaikovsky’s score was well received, but the choreography was criticized as amateurish. The dance was first performed in the U.S. in 1944 at the San Francisco Ballet and then it found a home in 1954 with the New York City Ballet under the directorship of George Balanchine with prima ballerina Maria Tallchief as the Sugar Plum Fariy.

Over the last 70 years the ballet has been directed by ballet luminaries including Rudolf Nureyev, Yury Grigorovich, and Mikhail Baryshnikov and it has been adapted, reimagined, and reinterpreted by ballet companies across the country.

The Boulder Ballet is under the artistic direction of Ben Needham-Wood.