Nutcracker magic returns to San Francisco

In 2004, San Francisco Ballet’s then-Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson took a creative leap with a new production of the perennially popular Nutcracker. Stakes were high; the San Francisco Ballet was, after all, the first U.S. company to stage and produce a full-length version (based on the Ivanov/Petipa 1892 original), which premiered on Christmas Eve, 1944, there … Read more

San Francisco Ballet and the (sorta) first Nutcracker

Willem Christensen and Gisella Caccialanza, 1944 It hadn’t been intended as a “timeless holiday classic,” that first year, on Christmas Eve day, 1944, when Willem Christensen, artistic director of the fledgling San Francisco Ballet, presented to audiences his complete, two-act Nutcracker production. He’d known he was doing something relatively new. The only other complete Nutcracker ballet outside Russia had been in … Read more