I wouldn't say this Nutcracker features the sustained choreographic challenge that the traditional work can put to its hordes of children. What it does have is energy and enterprise, and heart. After Sugar Plum's farewell, Clarice, asleep on the sofa, is awakened from her dream by her father, who's home in uniform from Iraq — the sweetest present of all.
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The Big Hurt: Season's beatings, Urban cheek, The real deal, More
- The Big Hurt: Season's beatings
Taking advantage of your seasonal obligation to buy stuff for people, the music industry unleashes its annual torrent of giftable crap: holiday albums, greatest-hits packages, high-profile releases, deluxe reissues.
- Urban cheek
There are several meanings to the word popular, and BalletRox’s The Urban Nutcracker satisfies the truest of them.
- The real deal
Nineteenth-century ballets are not all alike. But Boston Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is the real McCoy.
- Frank's way
Musical revues can be like videos of old golf tournaments — endless, amiable tedium interspersed with opportunities to wake up and smile nostalgically. Not so with My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra , at least not with this terrific production opening the season at Theatre by the Sea (through June 14).
- Ascending elegies
As we made our way up the ramps of the Guggenheim during the second part of Meredith Monk's Ascension Variations , we encountered a man in red curled up on his side on the floor, cradling a Jew's harp against his teeth.
- Countdown
With last week's news that Portland Press Herald managing editor Bob Crider has been summoned back to the state of Washington to run a Blethen-owned paper there.
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Live at the Paradise
- Downhill economy
Thrills, generally speaking, aren't cheap.
- Bina Osteria
Bina Osteria may be the last luxury restaurant to open in Boston for a long time — or at least the last that isn't situated in a boutique hotel.
- Gulf War vet 'saved' by Phoenix article
Yesterday, we published "Soldiers Committing Suicide," by Jason Notte, and just hours later, Mike Fitzgerald left our Portland editor a voicemail saying he's experiencing the same things a man described in the story had.
- Slideshow: Britney Spears at the Garden
Photos of Britney Spears, live at the Garden, March 16, 2009
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Topics:
Dance
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