‘Nutcracker’ memories

Holiday production has become a tradition for many local families

In Christine Perkins’ house, the Christmas magic this time of year manifests a bit differently. Instead of donning wool socks in reds and greens, the Perkinses lace up ballet slippers and skip caroling for months of rehearsals. Instead of “Holly Jolly Christmas,” the music you’ll hear twinkling through their halls is Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

Baton Rouge Ballet Theatre’s annual production of The Nutcracker: A Tale From the Bayou has inextricably woven itself into this family’s holiday traditions. Perkins has been dancing with the ballet company since 1994, and her daughter Emelia pirouetted into the leading role of Clara in 2012.

“It just changes the way you experience Christmas,” Perkins says. “The Christmas shopping gets done really late, and you miss a lot of Christmas parties … it’s busier, it’s crazier, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

The Perkins family is one of many that have found a home within the Nutcracker cast. The sense of community is as much a part of the production as the symphony or elaborate costumes, with 350 dancers ranging from 8 to 70 years old. According to co-creator and co-artistic director Molly Buchmann, there are doctors and businessmen still helping out backstage for the show even though their children haven’t danced in years.

This sprawling effort began in 1991, when Buchmann and fellow creator Sharon Matthews, in search of a way to personalize the Nutcracker they’d been directing for years, reimagined the ballet in a south Louisiana setting.

“We thought, ‘How can we keep the grandeur and the spectacle of The Nutcracker and give it a Louisiana twist?’ And all kinds of things with alligators and beignets came into our heads. We decided to use the only castle a Louisiana girl of that era would think of: the Old State Capitol,” Buchmann remembers.

With antebellum costumes and some familiar local backdrops, A Tale From the Bayou’s premier met warm reception, and the production has grown into a holiday staple in Baton Rouge.

Though audiences leave with memories of graceful fairies, enchanted toy soldiers and stunning Oak Alley sets, it’s the mishaps and accidents that stick with the cast and crew. Buchmann recalls a year that a dancer in full mouse costume fell offstage, leaving only a tail sticking up out of the orchestra pit.

Then there’s Leo Honeycutt, local newsman and author who joined the original Nutcracker’s cast on invitation in the mid-’80s. He remembers trying to stay in character after spilling champagne glasses full of noisy metal washers onstage in his very first performance.

“Even when things go wrong, it still works, because we never have people who aren’t great at what they do,” Honeycutt says. “And we all enjoyed spending that much time together. It was just a hoot.”

No matter what happens on stage, the support among the cast keeps dancers motivated and families cheering. Perkins recalls a time she teared up on stage during the ballet’s finale as she watched the leading dancer’s mother on the front row, jumping to her feet and weeping with joy at her daughter’s rapturous performance.

Perkins, who’s had all three of her children in the production, got a taste of that joy during her daughter Emelia’s turn as Clara. She remembers sitting in on rehearsals, watching Emelia struggle with a lift, only to be dazzled the first time she watched her daughter on stage.

“When the time came, I was watching from the audience, and the lift just went so incredibly perfect. I grabbed my husband’s hand, and I just gasped. It was just exhilarating. It would be like your son catching the winning touchdown in the championship,” Perkins says.

A year later, Christine and Emelia would find themselves paired up in a duet, a challenge that Christine says pushed them as dancers and as mother and daughter.

This celebration of legacy, Buchmann says, makes her proudest—not only in her cast, but also in her audiences.

“One year, a lady called the office [to say that] she had brought her daughter when she was a little girl. And then she started bringing her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend. And now she’s bringing a grandchild. … They want to see it year after year, and we work so hard that that’s very endearing to have people care that much about it,” Buchmann says.

For the families that have made A Tale From the Bayou part of their holiday traditions—and for every member of the community who snags a ticket—this ballet brings high art to life. It marries posh Victorian culture with familiar Southern sights and sounds. It transforms something lofty into something relatable, something at home among our Christmas gumbos and our cypress knees painted to look like Santa.

“There are two kinds of audience members. The ones who come year after year—to them it brings a Christmas tradition that they look forward to. The other segment of the audience are people seeing it for the first time, and there are always so many of those,” Buchmann says. “It’s so important for a community to have a Nutcracker, because it’s a very accessible thing for a person to see as their first big music or theatrical experience. It’s a window into the arts.”

See it again or for the first time
Baton Rouge Ballet Theatre’s production of The Nutcracker: A Tale From the Bayou is Dec. 20-21 (two productions each day) at the River Center. batonrougeballet.org