What a Nut!

It’s difficult to conceive that The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’ irreverent, inventive and deliciously entertaining version of The Nutcracker, is nearly 20 years old. Returning to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (where it had its U.S. premiere in 1992) for the first time in eight years, the production has now been around long enough to generate its own set of memories and reference points for its audiences and performers, just like traditional versions of the Tchaikovsky classic.

June Omura, a petite, luminous member of the Mark Morris Dance Group since 1988—and one of four original cast members performing in The Hard Nut this year—has never missed any of the nearly annual runs of the work, even as she gave birth to three children along the way. She’ll be performing as Fritz, the badly behaved son of the Stahlbaum family, as well as her original part in Morris’ robustly beautiful “Waltz of the Flowers.”

“I’ve been doing Fritz for about 15 years, and it’s actually more crazy now than it was earlier,” Omura says. “I’ve had fun with it over time. And my children have only inspired me to greater depths of childishness!”

She no longer performs the role of the Rat King, with its heavy padding and three Elvis-inspired heads, that she danced in the 1992 video version that has become the undisputed champion of the Ovation cable channel’s “Battle of the Nutcrackers” for the past three years. She laughingly recalls Morris’ original concept for the Rat King—which lasted for just the initial season.

“His idea was that since it was this monstrosity, that it should be performed by three people, all tangled up together so that you’d have those extra arms and legs. So he cast it with a man and two tiny women, so we would have to be lifted up on either side of the man in the middle, to give the impression of legs and arms squiggling all around. They never really came up with a workable concept for the costume, and at the last minute, they basically tied us up with gray stretchy fabric. We each had a mouse head on, and we had to shuffle out to the stage together, and try and do these lifts. The next year when they were going to film it, Mark announced that I’d been promoted to being Rat King all by myself. It was going to be the Rat King as Elvis, not young, cute Elvis, but old, fat Elvis!”

The Hard Nut premiered during the company’s three-year tenure in residence at Brussels’ Théâtre royal de la monnaie, benefiting from all the facilities available at a European opera house. Its vivid, witty designs—sets by Adrianne Lobel, costumes by Martin Pakledinaz—were inspired by the horror-comic art of Charles Burns, and set the action in a nightmarishly tacky suburbia of the late 1960s. The wickedly-depicted party guests, a boorish, horny bunch, sport notably hideous wigs and truly frightful red-and-green outfits mocking every fashion trend of the era. They get down and dirty doing the bump, and generally behave worse than any children.

“I wasn’t in the party scene originally, and I always felt very left out,” Omura says. “They were having so much fun and still do. The people who were in the original party scene did a lot of sketching-out of their own characters. And those continued to evolve, but for the most part those original characterizations have remained.”

Among her memories of the rehearsals was the novelty of Morris’ approach to the Snowflakes dance: a glorious whirlwind of a blizzard, performed by 22 dancers, men and women all costumed identically, several of them in pointe shoes. “I had been dancing in Nutcracker all my life; I grew up doing a version in Birmingham, Ala., and was used to hearing the snow scene music in a certain way. Mark, of course, was actually hearing it the way it is in the score. He is very true to the spirit and the letter of the music, in many ways.”

Omura recalls that Mikhail Baryshnikov, who came to Brussels to work on projects with Morris soon after leaving his position as American Ballet Theatre’s artistic director, was “pressed into service” as the Nutcracker during rehearsals. A knee injury prevented him from performing the role, which was originated by William Wagner, and is currently performed by David Leventhal, a recent Bessie Award winner. 

Others from the original cast include Joe Bowie, as a party guest, and Kraig Patterson—who has never missed a performance—as the hilarious Housekeeper/Nurse, who totters in black toe shoes while trying to maintain some semblance of order in the Stahlbaum household. Then there is Morris himself, who has left his longtime role as a notably louche party guest and for the first time plays Dr. Stahlbaum, the delightfully ineffectual patriarch.

The Hard Nut

Mark Morris Dance Group, Dec. 10-12, 15-19, Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave. (at Ashland Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; $25-70.