Springfield Ballet's production of Tchaikovsky's ballet classic The Nutcracker has been a local holiday tradition for more than 30 years. I talked with the company's Artistic and School Director, Ashley Paige Romines, about this year's version. She first gave me a detailed plot synopsis. " The Nutcracker is set in the 1800s. It is the Stahlbaum family, it's a party on Christmas Eve. Clara (the Stahlbaums' daughter) is the star of the show, really. It's her family's Christmas Eve celebration, she has all her friends there, and her mysterious 'Uncle Drosselmeyer'--that's what we call him in our production, but he's the godfather of Clara--gets her a gift of a nutcracker doll. She's thrilled to get that... but her brother Fritz, who torments her quite a bit, ends up breaking her nutcracker. Drosselmeyer magically fixes it. The party ends, and Clara wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to go search for her nutcracker. She finds it, and falls asleep on the couch. "The clock strikes
↧