The Rochester City Ballet performed Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker this weekend, and their performance on Saturday night was truly superb.
You couldn’t ask for anything more. Short of living in New York City and watching the New York City Ballet's performance of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker, or living in Moscow and watching the Bolshoi Ballet, this is as good as it gets.
The music was incredible, as it always is. The sets and the costumes were magnificent. Timothy Draper’s choreography was fantastic, and the dancing was out of this world.
I had an ear-to-ear smile on my face for the entire ballet.
Back in 1966, I was introduced to ballet during my freshman in college. As a poor city kid who grew up in a five-story, walk-up tenement in upper Manhattan, I didn’t know anything about ballet and wasn’t really interested in learning about it.
But as a freshman at Manhattan College, I had to take a music appreciation course, and one of my homework assignments was to go to Lincoln Center and watch The Nutcracker.
But rather than moan about another lousy homework assignment, I decided to turn the assignment into a date. I used twofers to buy two tickets (for the price of one); then I asked a girl to go out to dinner and a ballet (instead of dinner and a movie or dinner and a Broadway play).
She said yes, and I knew I had it made. No matter how bad the ballet was, at least I’d get a kiss goodnight when I walked her home. What else can a teenage boy ask for?
No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember who the girl was, but I met the love of my life that night, when I saw my first ballet.
Almost nothing puts a smile on my face as quickly as watching a ballet performance, and by far my favorite ballet in the whole world is The Nutcracker.
Even at my age, with white hair and all that goes with it, I’m still a rough and tumble guy, but no matter how tight money was as my family was growing up, every Christmas season I would scrounge together enough money to buy the whole family tickets to see The Nutcracker.
And every year my daughters would put on their favorite dresses and my son would put on his dress shirt, pants and shoes, and my wife and I would take them to the Eastman Theatre to see The Nutcracker.
It became a family tradition, like no other.
I guess that’s why my wife bought me three tickets as a birthday present this year (my birthday is in November) – one ticket for me, one for my wife, and one for our youngest daughter, who lives with us.
What a great birthday present! Every man should have a wife like that.
Later, my wife bought two more tickets, for my son and his fiancé. Then, when his fiancé’s family made a last minute decision to come up to Rochester for Thanksgiving, my son went out and bought them tickets too.
I must have done something right; he wouldn’t pass up a chance to see The Nutcracker.
So there were nine members of my extended family at the Eastman Theatre for the Saturday night performance of The Nutcracker by Rochester City Ballet.
What a rush!
My son’s fiancé comes from a hard-working, blue-collar immigrant family, and none of them had ever been to a ballet before. Not her father, who is a lot older than I am, nor her brother, nor his wife, nor their kids, who are four years old and fourteen months old.
Her family had seats in the row behind ours in the mezzanine, and it was an absolute joy to turn around and look at her family, and see the four year old, Jonathan, sitting on the edge of his seat, wide eyed, watching everything on stage.
It was heartwarming to see her sister-in-law sitting there with an ear to ear smile on her face, while her toddler sat quietly on her lap, mesmerized by the music, the dance, and the scenery.
During the entire performance, I never heard a peep from the toddler. I was worried that he might be too young, but I had nothing to worry about. Tchaikovsky’s music is for everybody; rich and poor, young and old. The Nutcracker is for everyone.
That’s what beautiful music is all about; it’s the great equalizer.
During the intermission, my wife took Jonathan, the four year old, downstairs to the orchestra level, where my son and his fiancé had seats. My wife took the boy all the way up to the where he could see where the orchestra sits. And he stood there naming the instruments.
“That’s a violin, and that’s a saxophone. Those are drums, and look how big the cymbals are!”
Life is great that way. Beautiful music transcends class and race, and national origin. There were people there that night, who had spent thousands of dollars to get the “best” seats; and there were people who scrounged their last pennies to buy a seat in the last row of the balcony.
But the amazing thing is; they all loved the music. And that’s what it’s all about.
Or is it?
As I was reading the program before the ballet started, I realized that The Nutcracker debuted on December 17, 1892; just twenty five years before the Russian Revolution.
It dawned on me, that if they had lived, Clara, and her brother Fritz, would have been victims of the Russian Revolution, in much the same way that Doctor Zhivago was; they ether would have been shot; or shipped off to a concentration camp in Siberia.
For the entire ballet, I couldn’t get that thought out of my head.
The Nutcracker is my favorite ballet, but it dawned on me that the situation in America today isn’t all that different from the situation Clara was in. The rich are rich and living the high life off the profits they make from having so many consumer goods made in China.
Most Americans are fat, dumb, and happy; without realizing how close to the edge they really are.
All great societies die. All great civilizations come to an end. So why do we think our great American way of life is any different?
Athens ceased to exist, despite the fact that it produced Aristotle, Plato, and the world’s very first concept of Democracy.
The Roman Empire ceased to exist, despite Julius Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny, and Tacitus.
That’s the way life is. Great civilizations rise and fall. Our American culture is no different.
At one time the sun never set on the great British Empire. Now the British Empire no longer exists. It is as extinct and irrelevant as the dinosaurs.
Our great American culture will go the same way, and if we don’t clean up our act, it will disappear sooner rather than later.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is a sign of discontent at the very foundations of our American society, and we’d better pay attention before our society implodes.
There is an entire generation of Americans in their twenties who have done exactly what we asked them to do, and they have nothing to show for it.
They studied hard. They got good grades. They took those college loans because we told them they would graduate and find good jobs. But when they graduated from college; there were no good jobs; no jobs that would pay them enough to live, and pay off their college loans.
We sold the next generation a bill of goods.
That’s why we have an Occupy Wall Street movement. That’s why our children may be in the same situation that Clara and her brother, Fritz, and Doctor Zhivago were in.
For them, and for Tchaikovsky, the Russian Revolution was right over the horizon, but there was no way they could see it coming.
For us, our society is coming apart at the seams, and if we don’t pay attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement, American society as we know it may cease to exist as fast as Tchaikovsky’s society disappeared in 1917.
Think about it.
It could happen tomorrow if we don’t do something to right the ship now.
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