Every September, the company opened its Nutcracker audition to anyone aged three or older. It was free and it was public. That single sentence explains more about how a regional ballet company survives than any amount of writing about repertoire, and it is the right place to start.
The open audition
A Nutcracker needs a large cast of children: party guests, mice, soldiers, angels, the small figures under Mother Ginger’s skirt. A company the size of Erie’s could not supply them from its own academy alone, and did not want to. Opening the audition to the whole region did three things at once. It filled the stage. It brought hundreds of families into contact with the organisation, some of whom became students and most of whom bought tickets. And it made the production genuinely civic — the audience contained a large number of people who were watching someone they knew.
This archive does not record who was cast in any year. Casting a Nutcracker is a matter about children, and the names, placements and results belong to the families involved rather than to a public record.
The live orchestra
The company commissioned a live orchestra and conductor for the production, and treated that as a defining commitment rather than a luxury. By the 2010s this had become genuinely unusual at this scale; a recorded score is cheaper by an order of magnitude and no small company is criticised for using one.
The recorded conductors span the company’s history. Walter Hendl and Bruce Morton Wright are named among the earlier ones — Hendl being a figure of real standing, an associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic and later director of the Eastman School of Music. In the last documented decade the podium belonged to Hugh Keelan, then music director of the Erie Philharmonic and previously fifteen years music director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic. The music page treats the orchestra and its conductors in more detail.
Choreographers and directors
Because the production ran annually for six decades, its choreographic credit list doubles as a roster of the company’s artistic leadership. The recorded contributors include Sharon Filone, who was school director from 1974 to 2004, and the artistic directors Robert Steele, Jeff Satinoff, Robert Vickery, Christina Maria Adelhardt, Gina Ribera-Illingworth and Lesley Bories-Scalise.
An annual production choreographed by a succession of directors is never quite the same ballet twice. Each incoming director inherits sets, costumes, an orchestra part and an audience with fixed expectations, and then adjusts what they can — usually the divertissements in the second act, occasionally the whole party scene. The result over sixty years is a version that belongs to the city rather than to any one choreographer, which is precisely what a civic Nutcracker is supposed to be.
Guest artists
Guest performers named in the company’s own record include Matthew Carter, Michele Gifford, Matthew Prescott, Carrie Burns-Frase and Ernest Tolentino. In the last documented decade the production also drew on dancers from BalletX in Philadelphia, from Neos Dance Theatre in Ohio, from the conservatory programme at Point Park University in Pittsburgh and from Mercyhurst University’s dance department in Erie itself.
Importing principals for the Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier is standard practice and serves two purposes: it raises the technical ceiling of the performance, and it gives the company’s own dancers a fortnight of working alongside people at a level above their own. For students in the corps it is often the single most instructive fortnight of the year.
Why one ballet carries a company
Nutcracker economics are not subtle. For a great many American regional companies the December production generates somewhere between a third and a half of annual earned income, and it does it in one weekend. The spring production, the new work, the outreach and a good deal of the school’s financial assistance all run on the surplus. That dependency is a structural weakness — a snowstorm on the wrong weekend is a budget crisis — but it also explains why companies invest so heavily in a ballet they have already staged fifty times.
The music is Tchaikovsky’s, composed in 1892 for the Imperial Ballet in St Petersburg to a scenario after E.T.A. Hoffmann, and it did not become an American December fixture until the 1950s and 60s. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on The Nutcracker gives a reliable account of that history. Erie’s company, founded in 1956, was formed almost exactly as that wave began — and its Nutcracker started within a few years of its founding, which is not a coincidence.
Two further pages follow this one: theatre week, which breaks down how the production was actually assembled, and the sensory-friendly performance, which the company built with a university special-education institute. How the production was presented covers the special performance series and the surrounding programme.