Birmingham Royal Ballet in The Nutcracker

Birmingham Royal Ballet has just opened its home theatre Nutcracker season. It’s good!

Momoko Hirata and Mathias Dingman in ‘The Nutcracker’. © Johan Persson

Birmingham Royal Ballet
The Nutcracker
★★★★✰
Birmingham, Hippodrome
23 November 2024, matinee
www.brb.org.uk
www.birminghamhippodrome.com

The Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) Nutcracker is now in its 34th season at the Birmingham Hippodrome, and it still feels like the biggest and best in the UK. Created by Peter Wright, its secret lies in being designed to the max for the Hippodrome by John Macfarlane, featuring the best transformation scenes and a simple, uncomplicated plot. Because of the full-on design, it’s not a production that can tour — if you want to see the best Nutcracker in the land, you go to Birmingham to see it¹. Period.

I attended the Saturday matinee, packed with kids, parents, pensioners, balletomanes, tiaras, glitter, ice cream, and sweets. It’s probably my happiest time in a theatre all year, with a fine show and a terrific, good-natured audience all as happy as Larry, too. Back in 2015, when the production had reached its 25th anniversary, BRB held special celebrations, and I captured some of the show’s background in this DanceTabs feature. You get an idea of the production’s scale from its cost — £1 million back in 1990, which would be nearly £2.5 million in today’s money.

While the sets might be complex and the costumes opulent, the BRB Nutcracker plot is simple. A young girl, Clara, attends her family’s posh Christmas party, complete with a strange magician, Drosselmeyer. That night, she has a weird dream involving the Christmas tree and house growing to enormous proportions — the famous transformation scene. There’s a battle with overgrown mice before she flies off to the Land of Snow, where the magician puts on a huge party for her, featuring much extraordinary dancing from around the world. The story ends with a grand pas de deux for the Sugar Plum Fairy and Prince before she wakes up with only happy memories. Perfect length and told over two 50-minute acts, it features the glorious Tchaikovsky score with its well-known tunes and many named dance roles for the dancers to sink their teeth into. Boring and unintelligible it is not — which is more than welcome after suffering a couple of modern takes on dance storytelling over the last 10 days.

We had what felt like luxury casting with Beatrice Parma as Clara. Parma, the company’s newest principal, is on stage most of the time and was ideal casting, dramatically and lyrically. She was on top of all the movement technicalities and was thrillingly musical too. I was also wowed by Momoko Hirata’s Sugar Plum Fairy, who was blissfully assured and smooth. Her Prince, Mathias Dingman, looked the part and generally delivered in the pas de deux, though he curiously underplayed jumps in earlier scenes. The matinee was only the second show of the run (of 24), and some aspects have yet to bed in, with the tempi curiously slow at times, one of the four Winds resembling a strange gust, and the Dross magic still being honed. However, Ryan Felix made a cheerfully perky Magician’s Assistant, Riku Ito a snappy and sparkling Harlequin, and the Russian Dance featuring Louis Andreasen, Alfie-Lee Hall, and Tom Hazelby was full of go-for-it fizz and much split jump elevation. And I have to give a huge bravo to all the beautifully coordinated Snowflakes.

Regardless of any minor quibbles, the company sells their Nutcracker well — they know it’s unique, and we all lapped it up. If you can, do make a pilgrimage to Brum and catch it — it plays through to 14 Dec 2024.