Review: ‘Brooklyn Nutcracker’ Is Simply, Imperfectly Charming

On Thursday, I went to “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” with a friend who grew up in Paris. A cosmopolitan balletomane, he can compare New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater not only with each other but also with the Paris Opera Ballet and other top troupes. He enjoys disagreeing with me about the relative merits of “Swan Lake” productions. Before the show, he issued strong views on the sanctity of Tchaikovsky’s score.

“The Brooklyn Nutcracker” — a 2016 production of Brooklyn Ballet, conceived and choreographed by Lynn Parkerson, the company’s founding artistic director — is being performed at the Irondale Center, just a six-minute walk from the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Neither of us had been there before. The audience sits on three sides of the open stage, and no seat is far from it. There is no curtain or orchestra pit, so we knew the dancing would be to recorded music.

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Advance publicity made a big deal of the fact that “The Brooklyn Nutcracker” incorporates both hip-hop and ballet. A vast “Nutcracker” face was projected on a screen behind the stage, which contained a miniature “Nutcracker” doll, a large magician’s cloak on a stand, and a red bag.

My companion had experienced nothing remotely like this — and yet the whole context made him eager for the show before it began. Me too. We knew we were on its side.

What transpired was imperfect by any standards. The ribbons of one of the Flowers’ pointe shoes came completely undone early in one number. Large chunks of Tchaikovsky’s score were omitted, including the music for the ascent of the Christmas tree, the battle of mice and toy soldiers, the Spanish and Chinese dances, and Mother Ginger. One very non-Tchaikovsky item was added: electronic music at the start of Act II for a Hip-Hop Hoop dance solo (Nakotah LaRance). Vivid and magical, it was also musically jarring. The scant narrative was seldom clear. No little heroine, no naughty brother, no little prince. The magician Herr Drosselmeyer gave out Christmas gifts from that red bag: A maid and butler officiated, but no parents were in view.

Yet the real pleasure I took from this “Nutcracker” was not just a matter of downscaled expectations. Drosselmeyer (Michael Fields, who is also a collaborating choreographer for the production) and some of his colleagues made musical sense of all the physical isolations of hip-hop: Their flexing deepened their characters’ mysteries appealingly. The Marzipan dance had four women dancing ballet and three in hip-hop style in witty counterpoint. The dance patterns of the Waltz of the Flowers, choreographed by the dance historian Claudia Jeschke with Ms. Parkerson, are based on ones from 19th-century archival drawings. (The Brooklyn Ballet has a good track record in restoring lost dance information to the stage.)

Ingrid Silva (from Dance Theater of Harlem) was the Sugar Plum Fairy. Petite and quietly self-possessed in manner, she’s an impressively strong technician with apparently effortless fouetté turns. The often acrobatic Snow pas de deux, danced, as in so many productions, to the transformation music in Act I, was performed by Miko Kawamura and Acée Francis Laird; the way Mr. Laird stands, partners and dances is of unusual elegance and distinction.

Most remarkably of all to this “Nutcracker” connoisseur, this production’s Arabian dance, performed by Sira Melikian, is the most satisfyingly gorgeous I’ve seen: not an imitation piece of eastern culture in hoochie-coochie style but a real example of belly dancing, sensuously fitted to the music. The trills with which Tchaikovsky sensuously ends some phrases were matched by the rapid pelvic undulations that can be the most singular of belly dancing’s marvels. Elsewhere Ms. Melikian vibrated her shoulders with equal speed and voluptuousness. Near the dance’s conclusion, Drosselmeyer joined her — neither her master nor her suitor, just a colleague moving in a harmoniously different style. “The Nutcracker,” with its multiple national dances, has always been socially inclusive; this production’s cultural pluralism was particularly affable.

“The Brooklyn Nutcracker” was technically inclusive too: Ensembles featured women on pointe beside others (especially young girls) in softer dance slippers. Some execution was patchy, but you could see a strict plan everywhere; conscientiousness shone. Watching it, you want this admirable and endearing production to become a foundation for something larger and along the same lines in winters to come — with more music and more story.