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Ballet companies are like department stores: They both need a way to bring in money at times other than the Christmas season.
The same way big retailers claw themselves into the black in December, ballet pays most of its year-long bills with The Nutcracker. Audiences whose cultural intake is otherwise limited to NASCAR and American Idol feel somehow compelled to dose themselves—and their kids—with an evening of Tchaikovsky's greatest hits, plus hand-me-down scraps of the original 19th-century Petipa choreography. Nevada Ballet Theatre's obligatory holiday offering is certainly one of the better regional productions, long on both period charm and up-to-date fun. Problem is, when January's dismal Epiphany rolls around once more and the toy-soldier costumes are hung up backstage, how to get those occasional customers in the seats again?
Scanning across the calendar, more than one company director has decided that Halloween has more entertainment potential than, say, Labor Day. (Though the Fourth of July does get some action, as the programming occasion for Americana such as Britisher Kenneth MacMillan's ragtime Elite Syncopations and Paul Taylor's Company B; NBT artistic director Bruce Steivel's stylish variation on the same Glenn Miller musical repertoire, the WWII USO-set In the Mood, could stand becoming a summer perennial as well.) How to sell it, though, to high-culture habitues and the once-in-a-while dabblers?
It's easy to imagine a latter-day impresario scratching his head over such a dilemma: "I've got a company full of good-looking young people, who can bend their limber bodies into just about any pose imaginable. What's the pitch I should go for?" To which his loyal accountant replies, "Well, gosh, Mr. Bialystock—sorry, I mean Mr. Diaghilev—I just don't know. How about, um, sex?"
Entire reputations as theatrical geniuses have rested on lesser premises than this.
Of course, ballet has a long tradition of peddling, if not sex, at least sexiness. There's a reason that George Balanchine once said, "All ballets should be called Swan Lake." That's the one that packs them in, fills the seats, sells the tickets. And of course, beneath its feathery armor of officially approved respectability, it's the most kinky. Or at least it is once Prince Siegfried and White Swan Odette stop pledging their eternal love to each other like lovesick teenagers, and Black Swan Odile takes the stage, hell-bent—literally—on seduction and dancebelt-straining male arousal. It's the rare prima ballerina not suffering from multiple personality disorder who can pull off the dual role. Sweet-faced Margot Fonteyn could yank tears from a stone with her broken-hearted white swan, but her black swan always seemed a little low in the sheer viciousness quotient required of a really successful dominatrix, even given that she was playing opposite one of Rudolf Nureyev's greatest impersonations of a heterosexual. The Bolshoi's Natalia Bessmertnova had the advantage of dancing Yuri Grigorivich's post-Jungian choreography, which among other things eliminated Odile's traditional entrance of pitter-patting down the palace's rear staircase, instead having her burst onstage from below, a rocket from the subconscious, electricity almost visibly crackling around her like Forbidden Planet's Id Monster, if the Id Monster were really hot-looking and could dance. (This performance used to be available on VHS. Didn't we win the Cold War? If so, why haven't the Soviet film vaults been raided and transferred to DVD?) However performed, either toned-down and precious or with the hormones cranked up to 11, Swan Lake can be relied on as a box-office draw, in an arena where there aren't many such.
Unfortunately, while hardcore balletomanes can happily see Swan Lake over and over, the casual audience can decide that having seen it once, or maybe twice, their cultural obligations have been satisfied, and they can go back to fretting over who's going to be voted off the island. Fortunately, another erotic—or, more accurately, eroticized—cultural icon had appeared, ready to be sent to dance class and made both more respectable and more interesting.
Timid suburban goth types might believe that the notion of sexed-up vampires began with the once seemingly endless Lestat retreads of Anne Rice. In reality, the best-selling nerve struck by Rice's self-pitying consumerist odes had their origins less with Bram Stoker than they did with the immortal Judith Krantz's Beverly Hills shoppin'-&-screwin' epics. A more accurate pop-cultural history would give the prize for turning the barely subtle metaphor of bloodsucking as coitus into something more obvious—vampire as stud—to Frank Langella's onstage Dracula impersonation, back in 1978. It's easy to forget that Langella, now an effective heavy-faced character actor, was back then slaughtering Broadway matinee matrons in the theater aisles, with his brooding Mediterranean glower and jet-black Elvis-y pompadour.
Any time you have a story that the audience knows before it opens the program book, it's likely that there will be a ballet version of it at some point. (That's why all the fairy-tale ballets.) No need for tedious dialogue when you can mime a bite on the neck and, more importantly, its effect on both biter and bitten. A lot of partner work in ballet consists of swooning falls on the part of the ballerina, hopefully short-stopped before she hits the stage by a guy in tights, his other hand up in the air as though to wave to Mom in the balcony. Plus, there are the capes—male dancers know they look good, dashing on stage like Nureyev in Frederick Ashton's Marguerite and Armand, yards of inky parachute cloth streaming behind them. The ballerinas have a natural advantage in portraying vampire victims; they spend so much time indoors in the studio that outside of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, it doesn't take much makeup to have them appear as if, blood-wise, they're a couple of quarts low.
Since it's as close to an overdue, universally good idea as can be found, it's no wonder that around the world, ballet versions of Dracula have been rising from the grave like Viagra-enhanced undead. (Or was that Hugh Hefner at the Palms?) England's Northern Ballet Theatre has had one in the repertoire since 2001, with a cinematic, propulsive score by the late Philip Feeney. U.S. productions, from Houston to Boston to Alabama, rely more on crash-edited scary-music snippets, as does NBT, with mixed results.
The actual evolutionary link between Swan Lake and Dracula is through the old ballet's bad guy, the evil sorcerer Rothbart. Originally not much more than a necessary part of the story-telling machinery, skulking out from the wings to crank the gears of the plot, then sitting back with the prince's mother to watch the results, Rothbart's role is enlarged in the more effective Swan Lake productions to nearly the level of the two lovebirds. Costuming helps; Rothbart is sometimes depicted as more bat than bird, complete with scallop-edged underarm wings, an image that works better than the unfortunate owl get-up that's still occasionally seen—as though Woodsy Wood-Owl, after a long day of giving conservation lectures to Boy Scouts, were to kick back in the forest with a liter of absinthe and his harem of long-legged cygnets. When Rothbart becomes a lean, sexy and menacing predator, then it's only a matter of time before he flaps into the center of his own ballet, even if under a new name.
Nevada Ballet Theatre's recent Dracula production was more pumped-up than sleek, and that works as well. With principal dancer Baris Erhan's leonine profile, stylized gestures and torso muscles etched by a black mesh top, this take on the character was a long way from Bela Lugosi's suave Mittel-Europaeische gentleman, eyes twinkling with fresh-from-the-needle morphinated elegance. Choreographer Steivel's creation is a big physical presence, tossing aside mere mortals like Marvel Comics supernumeraries—Dracula as Übermensch, as though Leni Riefenstahl had taken a break from filming Triumph of the Will to do a quick remake of Nosferatu. If nothing else, it returned an effectively scary element to the character, no longer brooding about his immortal fate but simply ready to kick your ass and steal your girlfriend.
Will a dance Dracula become a Halloween staple in Las Vegas, selling tickets as steadily as other ballet companies hope their productions will? Maybe, but it's bucking against long odds; for most people here, Halloween is noticed if at all as only another occasion to get drunk and dress up like a ho, just as if there weren't 364 other days a year to do that, Christmas included. Megasuccess or not, it's still a worthwhile alternative, a high-culture pas de deux with the sexy cousin from the other side of the tracks. The Vegas dance scene could do with an annual transfusion this potent.
Of course, if the rules of modern marketing Nos. 1 through 10 are simply Sex Sells (with the corollary of The Kinkier the Better), it doesn't take a retail genius to realize that cash-heavy customers don't switch off their naughty bits just because it's December. Or do they? Perhaps the only thing that sells as well in America as sex is sentimentality. Commercial fortunes have been made with sticky-sweet souvenirs of a world that never much existed outside of Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra's imaginations. Ballet's Nutcracker fixation at least has an honest pedigree, dreaming of sugarplums since first trotting onstage back in 1892. In the U.S., the date is 1944, when San Francisco Ballet's Willam Christensen first brought it over from Europe, beating George Balanchine to the punch by a decade. It's an indication of some atom of unsullied decency within the human soul that productions of the Nutcracker ballet have remained so unsexualized for so long. If the world in which it takes place is Biedermeyer kitsch filtered through a faux Victorian scrim, it's at least one in which romance and innocence, on the parts of both children and adults, are genuine enough to be nothing more than that, rather than just come-on poses, trolling for business like working girls dressed up as cheerleaders on Tropicana Boulevard.
Not that there haven't been attempts to jack up the Nutcracker's content by way of striking a self-congratulatory épater le bourgeois pose. One man's icon is another's over-inflated target, ripe for a deflationary prick. One of genius choreographer Mark Morris' few total misfires is his The Hard Nut take on the story, originally done for Brussels' Theatre de la Monnaie in 1991, full of dud slapstick jokes and limp barbs aimed at post-Eisenhower-era suburban culture. Even Maurice Sendak, normally spot-on with kids' stories, wound up designing a ferociously ugly Nutcracker for Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet, with a nightmarish three-headed Rat King that had parents carrying terrified children out of the theater.
Nevada Ballet doesn't take that road with their Nutcracker. The local dance audience isn't yet so jaded that it needs outré thrills to get through an evening of flakes and flowers. With something this traditional, the newness comes from observing how much life Bruce Steivel's well-trained, enthusiastic dancers bring to roles that were codified in the rehearsal studio before their grandparents were born. Set in stone? Not quite. There's still something magical in even the silliest account of the unreal becoming real, of the enchanted turning into flesh-and-blood, and vice versa. Face it: You're not likely to go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, so you might as well do your soul at least a bit of good at this time of year. Drop a little less cash on cheap plastic crap at Wal-Mart, and buy a couple of tickets to Nutcracker instead, before it's too late for you to have ever been a child.