Review: ELLINGTON/STRAYHORN NUTCRACKER at Dance St. Louis

It’s a very major event in the St. Louis arts world.

It is certainly one of the most perfect evenings I’ve ever spent in a theater!  Last night St. Louis Dance Theatre joined Jazz St. Louis in a production of Nutcracker—that remarkable Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.  Strayhorn was Ellington’s long-time collaborator, and this adaptation was released as an album in 1960.

Jazz St. Louis has been performing this Nutcracker in concert at the Skip Viragh Center for the past eleven years.  But this year’s event is a whole new world! 

There are two parts to the evening:

• Sophisticated Syncopation:  First we enjoy seven vignettes, if you will: the Jazz St. Louis Septet plays four classic Christmas songs interspersed with three dance numbers.    
• Gaslight Dreams:  After an intermission the grand drape rises!  We are taken to a legendary time and place in St. Louis entertainment history—Gaslight Square.  We see an imagined meeting between Billy Strayhorn and the great Josephine Baker. 

There is powerful artistic muscle in this show.  Victor Goines, the President and CEO  of Jazz St. Louis, is a towering figure in American jazz.  He composed the three dance vignettes and arranged nearly all the rest of the evening’s music.  He conducts the septet and the Jazz St. Louis Big Band.

Kirven Douthit-Boyd, Artistic Director of St. Louis Dance Theatre, choreographed the entire evening.  His is a younger talent than that of Mr. Goines, but it is a mature, strong and confident talent.  His resume includes work with Alvin Ailey and other top dance companies.  He fills the evening with varied, graceful, athletic dancing.  They say of Duke Ellington that he had such a deep familiarity with the gifts of each musician in his band that he wrote music specifically targeted to each of those voices.  The choreography in this Nutcracker suggests that Mr. Kirven (as he prefers) has a similar knowledge of his dancers;  throughout the evening the more than twenty dancers in the company somehow maintain distinct personalities.

The remarkable scene designers Peter and Margery Spack give us a jazz club in Gaslight Square at its heyday.  There’s a classic band-stand and a bar.  We see the streets outside.  Behind and above there is a wonderful projected world:  great wisps of smoke, fog, fire, huge flowers, great paper fans.  Strangely this does not distract—but somehow helps us to focus on the glorious dance.  The set was built with the help of the MUNY’s Teen Tech Training program.  Fluid and agile lighting is by Zack Metalsky.  Fine period costumes are by Shevaré Perry and Brandin Vaughan.

Dave McCall is simply perfect as Strayhorn—graceful, agile, his every gesture demands our attention.  (On the Saturday matinee Demetrius Lee will dance this role.)

Josephine Baker is danced by Nyna Moore.  Hers is another remarkable gift.  This is not your standard ballerina;  Ms. Moore is tall, “statuesque” even.  She’s curvaceous—and in a glimmering liquid silver lamé gown she is temptation itself.  Every swift sweep of an arm or leg is precise and dramatic.

The plot is simple:  all the ladies in the club flirt with Billy, but, to their chagrin, Billy has eyes only for Femi, one of Josephine Baker’s chorus boys.  (Strayhorn, in life, lived openly as a gay man in a time when that was a dangerous stance.)  There’s some police harassment of a gay couple, a raid on a gay bar.  But love, if it doesn’t triumph, at least survives. 

The show is “through-choreographed”—i.e. the dancing never stops, though its focus and mood change.  There are street-scenes, a dance floor full of jitter-buggers, there is drama, there is comedy.  A stage full of sweeping arcs of limbs turns into lots of busy little footwork.  There’s variety!  There’s charm!  And it’s all to those recognizable tunes by Tchaikovsky.  But what a difference!

All in all it’s a triumphant night for both St. Louis Dance Theatre and for Jazz St. Louis.  

Ellington/Strayhorn Nutcracker, played at the acoustically splendid Skip Viragh Center at Chaminade.  Let’s hope that this production becomes a Christmas tradition there.

To post a comment, you must register and login.