INTERVIEW: Clara in this ‘Nutcracker’ heads to the Jersey Shore
Photo: The Nutcracker Rocks is a modern take on the classic Tchaikovsky ballet. Photo courtesy of Axelrod Performing Arts Center / Provided with permission.
There are some bankable guarantees come holiday season: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation will air multiple times on television, the smell of cookies will waft in and out of houses, and The Nutcracker will be performed on countless stages around the world.
That makes staging a new rendition of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet something of a Christmas miracle. The story of Clara and her journey to the Land of Sweets is so well known that standing out amongst the rest can be an impossible venture for a ballet company.
The Axelrod Performing Arts Center in New Deal, New Jersey, located five minutes from Downtown Asbury Park, is having no problem making their new Nutcracker distinct from the rest of the choreographic creations. That’s because of the visionary work of Gabriel Chajnik, choreographer of the show and founding director of the new Axelrod Contemporary Ballet Theater.
The Nutcracker Rocks, featuring music from Gaslight Anthem band members Alex Rosamilia and Alex Levine, plays Dec. 20-22 at the Jersey Shore venue. Matteo DeBenedetti, Asbury Park musician, stars in the production.
“It’s a dream that I had when I met Alex Levine from the Gaslight,” Chajnik said in a recent phone interview.
That dream goes back even further than when he first met Levine. The choreographer first became attached to the Axelrod Performing Arts Center after one of the coaches at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Monmouth County introduced him to Jess Levy, founding CEO of Axelrod.
“Jess found out that I was a choreographer and a dancer,” he said. “I’m originally from Argentina. I was trained there as a classical dancer from when I was young, and I came to the United States in 1994. And I auditioned for the Juilliard School, and I got accepted. And so I decided to stay here in America. I had a great career, 37 years, and I danced all over the country and the world — very, very, very fortunate.”
During Chajnik’s time as a dancer he was constantly brought in by companies to choreograph different works, and he saw his career slowly transitioning from performer to dance maker. He worked for a ballet company in Denver, created routines for two operas and choreographed for the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, among other places. This is in addition to his own dance work with American Repertory Ballet.
“So when I met Jess, he said, ‘You know, Gabriel, I really would like to introduce you to one of the new members of the board. She’s very passionate about dance. Her name is Elise Feldman,'” Chajnik remembers. “And I met Elise, and Elise and I really hit it off. And she said, ‘Gabriel, I really think that you should open up a professional ballet company here in Monmouth County.’ The Jersey Ballet is up [in] north Jersey, and it’s an institution that has been around for 50 years. Then there’s Princeton Ballet on the other side of the state, but there is not really a professional point of orientation for all the young kids in the area that would like to be dancers. So I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.'”
The Nutcracker Rocks is the fourth ballet choreographed by Chajnik for the new company. His journey began with A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2018, and ever since then, he has made it his mission to add theatrical elements to each show. This is because of Axelrod’s dedication to musical theater.
“I decided to add theatrical elements to the ballet so it’s a bit more approachable for people to really understand the stories,” he said. “If you’re not a person that is used to going to the ballet, sometimes ballet pantomime can be difficult to understand, so I wanted to create a special vocabulary for the Axelrod when it comes to dance and ballet. And so the last ballet that I did was Alice in Wonderland, and I worked with a composer. And we included spoken word, and we had a children’s choir. For Jungle Book, I worked with the classical Indian school that added the classical Indian dance component, so I add elements that will allow people to really identify with the story.”
The board at the Axelrod suggested that he tackle The Nutcracker, the beloved holiday ballet. At first, Chajnik had reservations about such a project because of the ubiquity of the show.
“I can’t do a regular Nutcracker because everybody does The Nutcracker,” he said with a laugh. “There are 39 Nutcrackers in New Jersey. I live in Ocean Grove. I’m an Ocean Grove resident, right next to Asbury Park, and I’m connected and have many friends in Asbury Park, many of them artists. Asbury Park is really a vortex right now for artists, especially when it comes to music, so that comes back to Alex Levine from the Gaslight Anthem. I met Alex, and we became very good friends. I said, ‘Alex, I really would like to create a Nutcracker that is a nonconventional Nutcracker that will add some of the Asbury Park and the Jersey Shore flavor into it. I’m dreaming to add some layers of rock on it.’ He was like, ‘Hmmm, this is interesting.’ So he got Alex Rosamilia from the band also, and they jumped into the project.”
Chajnik said the music landscape they created for the piece is incredible, but audiences should not expect solely rock ‘n’ roll. The choreographer decided to have a little bit of everything in the show. This past October, he worked with Jason C. Tramm and the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra to complete a special recording of Tchaikovsky’s original Nutcracker music.
“We needed a special tempo, and we did special textures to add the rock on it,” Chajnik said. “So we did a special recording with 40 musicians at the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove the first week of October, so people will still have the massive, beautiful score of Tchaikovsky that is such a tradition in every Nutcracker, but yet an element of rock. And the element of rock comes with one of the characters in The Nutcracker, who is Drosselmeyer.”
For the unbeknownst, Drosselmeyer is Clara’s godfather, and it is he who brings the gifts and toys to the Christmas Eve party. One of those gifts is a nutcracker, which magically comes to life, fights off scurrying mice and eventually whisks Clara away to the Land of Sweets.
“But in my story, Clara is a very, very privileged girl that lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan,” he said. “The party scene is actually Christmas Eve, and we are at a party in a penthouse on the East Side. I’m taking it out of the Victorian times and bringing it to the contemporary times, so in 2019 we’re in New York City. And Clara is almost like a teenage Scrooge, you know. She doesn’t believe in the holidays. She doesn’t understand them. She doesn’t appreciate them. She’s just interested in basically texting with her friends and doing what kids do nowadays.”
The godfather arrives at the party and brings the magic, or in this case, the rock ‘n’ roll. His weapon is his music, and the new rock score starts to take over.
“So he brings that aspect of his life, of his artistry into this party, a black-and-white party very uptight, very dull and begins to really bring a lot of dynamic into the party scene,” the choreographer said. “From that, he takes Clara on a journey. Usually in the regular Nutcracker, he takes Clara to the Land of the Sweets. Well, in our version, he’s going to take Clara to the Jersey Shore, and the Land of the Sweets is actually Van Holten’s, the candy store in Seaside Heights. We’re actually working with Van Holten’s in a relationship with them, and they’re creating candy for the second act that will have the names of all the dances of the second act. So the candy comes to life for her in her dream, and by the end of the ballet she really gets a better feel of what the holidays mean.”
He added: “The holidays bring this special electricity in the air, this very particular energy, and that’s really what I wanted to invoke with that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Nutcracker Rocks, produced by Axelrod Contemporary Ballet Theater and choreographed by Gabriel Chajnik, features a reimagined Tchaikovsky score by Alex Rosamilia and Alex Levine of the Gaslight Anthem. Click here for more information and tickets.
