Nickell’s Bag

Following up, in a way, on the underlying point I was trying to make last week about Missoula’s dueling presentations of “The Nutcracker” this year, the Washington Post ran a provocative article on Sunday, which posits that the ubiquity of Tchaikowsky’s classic is “all but squeezing ballet dry” and “emblematic of how dull and risk-averse American ballet has become.”

Check it out, here.

I’m not sure the points made in that article are all entirely valid in Missoula — where a professional ballet scene has never existed, and where even the basic classics beyond “The Nutcracker” have never been commonly seen — but it sorta reflects my basic contention that, to many of us here, classical ballet has ended up synonymous with “The Nutcracker.”