Not so cracking show for the Vienna Festival Ballet (From Gazette Series)

Not so cracking show for the Vienna Festival Ballet at the Stroud Subscription Rooms

11:18am Wednesday 7th December 2011 in What's On By Marion Sauvebois

Granted the stage at Stroud’s Subscription Rooms is narrow, small and overall ill-suited for a ballet of the Nutcracker’s scale.

Granted, there is no space for an orchestra. There is, in fact, not even space for a proper sound system.

The two forlorn speakers, placed at each end of the stage on coffee tables right in the audience’s field of vision, stuck out like sore thumbs.

All this is unfortunate but the Vienna Festival Ballet must have known what they were up against.

Yet, they looked like lost souls thrown onto the stage, awkwardly toiling through the choreography and desperately trying not to bump into each other.

Visible shaking, wobbles by the bucket-load and stiff and ungraceful movements…the list of hiccups throughout the performance goes on and on.

Having seen The Nutcracker before, I know that this is a purely magical experience with mesmerising solos from Clara, the young heroine, and the nutcracker-turned prince.

Despite the choreography’s technical complexity, it should look effortless to the audience and beautifully convey the characters’ personalities and emotions.

Here, however, the dancers were hardly ever in sync with each other, making this a very frustrating experience for the audience.

The over-the-top ‘comical’ scenes scattered throughout to perhaps lighten the mood—I am taking a shot in the dark here as I have no idea what they were hoping to achieve with those—only gave the impression that we had stepped into a parallel universe where The Nutcracker was actually written as a cheap panto.

This was truly a car-crash of a performance.