The Nutcracker, The Vicky Simegiatos Dance Company Dec. 22, 2019.

One of the pleasures of seeing the Vicky Simegiatos Nutcracker was the venue, The St. George Theater on Staten Island; two of my daughter's friends take class at Simegiatos's school and had small parts in the production.  The theater was built in 1928 as a movie and vaudeville theater, seats 1900 with excellent sightlines and is a masterpiece of kitsch, beautifully restored starting in 2004. 

The choreography was by Vicky Simegatos and her daughter Matina Simegiatos and was impressively danced by the amateur company.  The children were well-rehearsed and demonstrated a keen enthusiasm as mice, soldiers and angels; Madison Pender was a charming Clara and Athan Sporek an assertive Nutracker Prince. Ask la Cour and Teresa Reichlen, from NYC Ballet, were the Sugar Plum Fairy and Her Cavalier, which --for better or worse--made clear how different Balanchine's production is from the one we were seeing, if only the elegant complexity of their pas de deux.  Simegiatos, like Balanchine, uses the original libretto by Petipa and Ivanov from 1892 but very intelligently keeps the choreography much simpler for the amateur dancers, who communicated the pleasure of dancing to Tchaikovsky's necessarily taped score.