Timeless magic

The mirrored walls and floor are painted gray, and a drab drizzle steadily falls outside the window overlooking Spring Street. The Atlanta Ballet rehearsal space is a Spartan room of hard surfaces and unflattering fluorescent tube lighting, more like a stalag than a place that might produce something of beauty.

It’s mid-November and ballet mistress Dale Shields, perched on the edge of a folding metal chair, is rehearsing company dancers for “Nutcracker,” queuing up a recording of Tchaikovsky’s timeless score over and over.

Joshua Reynolds, the Cavalier, lifts petite Tara Lee, whose hot-pink tutu provides the room’s only color, and they sweep gracefully across the floor. But when Reynolds returns his Sugar Plum Fairy to terra firma, he groans, “Oh, oh, oh,” as if he’d just hoisted the 8-foot-tall Rat King instead, and strips off his back brace and throws it down dejectedly.

Clearly, we’re a long way from the rich costumes and magical (if fake) snow of the shiny, ornate Fox Theatre, where 19 performances of “Nutcracker” step lively starting Friday.

And we’re eons removed from the first Atlanta Ballet performance of “Nutcracker” staged by Robert Barnett, newly arrived from the New York City Ballet, 50 years ago. In an April 1959 program at the long-gone Tower Theatre in Midtown, Barnett mounted the second act of George Balanchine’s now-classic choreography.

A native of Russia, Balanchine was a living link to the roots of “Nutcracker,” which premiered in 1892 in St. Petersburg. He danced the role of the Prince/Cavalier in his homeland in 1919 when he was all of 15.

The ghosts of “Nutcrackers” past hover over the Atlanta Ballet, which has been presenting the dance based on the 1816 E.T.A. Hoffman story longer than any American company save for New York City Ballet. And there’s no reason to think there’s not at least 50 more years left in the tank.

Doing anything for five decades, with no end in sight, is enough to make any contemporary dancer groan louder than Reynolds did from his sore back or Lee did later when a masseuse worked over her tight neck and the throbbing crimson bunions on her abused feet.

But at Atlanta Ballet, or any American dance company with an eye on the bottom line, seldom is heard a dissing word about “Nutcracker.” Last December, it brought in $1.58 million in ticket sales, 57 percent of the company’s earned income for the season.

“It’s kind of a timeless thing,” says artistic director John McFall, who replaced the Balanchine version with his own choreography in 1995. “It’s like a gift.”

Tara Lee, who at 34 has danced in various versions for different troupes every year except one since she was 12, acknowledges her fellow dancers bellyache a little when it’s time to return to the world of winged dream-fairies and flying sleighs, but they quickly get over it.

“Dancers always joke, ‘Oh, it’s ‘Nutcracker’ time’ and, you know, roll our eyes,” she acknowledges. “But I think actually we still have lots of fun with it because no matter how many times you do it, there’s always something new you can bring to the table.”

In fact, there’s more new on that groaning board this year than since McFall banished the Balanchine and unleashed his creation, featuring a scary Rat King to replace the cartoony rodent and a 15-foot-tall Mother Matrushka (from whose massive skirt “nesting dolls” tumble onto the stage). At the time nearly a decade and a half ago, he called it “something magical in the theater — arts for the MTV generation.”

Now that MTV generation is rapidly approaching their reading glasses years, with kids of their own to strap in to the minivan and haul to the Fox. Time advances like a Nutcracker army, and McFall, who’s 63 but has daughters 5 and 2, has adjusted the show accordingly.

“The sequence and pace of the performance and the storytelling are definitively focused for a contemporary American audience,” he says. “There is more action, less mime, and the characters and their relationships are heightened.”

A couple of the more significant changes:

Protagonist Marya Petrov, performed by a company member for the first time, gets the honor (formerly the Nutcracker’s) of offing the vile Rat King. “This is a metaphor or comment on our culture,” McFall says. “Young girls tend to be more independent and liberated. I have two young daughters and perhaps was influenced by my personal experience to consider this approach.”

McFall also has added male dancers to the Waltz of the Flowers and increased the number of couples dancing various roles to 10 (two in each performance). He said he wanted to challenge a greater number of principals with “significant roles that are more demanding.”

The artistic director’s belief is that dancers today — particularly his dancers — are better, stronger and more diversely talented than, well, ever. “Artistically, they provide more for choreographers. With that thought in mind, you owe it to them. Why keep something back in 1950‚ if you can go further with it?”

If that sounds like a poke at his predecessor Barnett, who remained true to the Balanchine choreography from 1959 to 1995, it’s not meant that way. Only the second and third artistic directors in the Atlanta Ballet’s 80-year history, they have genuine respect for each other, even if they disagree on the matter of hewing to tradition.

Barnett, who will be honored on opening night at the Fox and at a Georgian Terrace hotel “alumni” reception afterward, says he wasn’t angry or hurt when McFall set his own choreography on the story the year after his departure.

“No, everybody has to do what they have to do,” says Barnett, 82, from his home in Asheville, N.C. “And John had done other productions in other cities.” That includes BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio, which McFall directed for eight years before coming to Atlanta.

That doesn’t mean Barnett agreed with his successor or other companies that take more extreme departures, such as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker” production designed by Maurice “Where the Wild Things Are” Sendak. “I think if you’re going to do it, do it like it’s supposed to be done,” Barnett says. “If you want a new ballet, then do a new ballet, and call it something else. But don’t mess with it. That’s how tradition gets lost.”

If Barnett speaks with passion, it’s because he was there for “Nutcracker’s” beginning at New York City Ballet in 1954. Balanchine, in fact, created the demanding role of Candy Cane for him, and Barnett attributes three knee surgeries to the rigors of dancing it eight times a week.

He was certain there would be a big audience for this “charming and very children-friendly” ballet when he and his wife, Virginia Rich Barnett, were hired by what was then the Atlanta Civic Ballet as associate artistic directors and principal dancers. So Barnett called his mentor and asked his permission to stage “Nutcracker.”

Balanchine told the Barnetts they could reproduce any of his ballets they could remember, no royalty charged.

But because of the Atlanta company’s minuscule annual budget ($16,000), they could afford to perform only one act in 1959. Every year thereafter, however, Barnett would add a little bit more, until he finally staged the full ballet for the first time in 1965 at Atlanta’s old Municipal Auditorium downtown, better known as home to sweaty Georgia Championship Wrestling bills.

Those humble beginnings are hard to imagine today, where it takes five tractor trailers and three Ryder trucks to haul the more than eight tons of scenery, lighting and props to the Fox.

The man responsible for all that freight, director of production Thomas Fowlkes, compares putting the show together to “wrangling cats.”

“It it’s more about putting 10 pounds of show in a five-pound theater,” he continues, about the 1929 movie palace. “The Fox is beautiful, but backstage is very tight without a lot of storage space for all those tons of equipment.”

For the “Nutcraker’s” three-week run, costume shop director Elena Rao scrambles back and forth between the Fox and the ballet’s West Peachtree Street headquarters, trying to keep the 250 costumes, some nearly two decades old, show-worthy.

“When a costume fits, it goes like the dancer,” says Rao. “When it doesn’t fit, or if there’s a hole, it’s cheap. Then [the dancers] don’t feel like princes and princesses. And they have to have that feeling.”