Nine
The Hard Nut
One of the haunts where we gathered to drink and vent was a downtown theme bar called Le Cercueil (“the coffin”), a candlelit funeral home, complete with casket tables with flowers, skull tankards, and Gregorian chant on the sound system. During one late-night conversation, Misha, Rob, Guillermo, Barry, and I came up with the idea of my choreographing one of the big Tchaikovsky ballets: Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, or The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker! Why not? We had an orchestra and a budget at our disposal. When Mortier had first asked me what I wanted to do, I’d immediately suggested L’Allegro. Done. So I proposed The Nutcracker. It took one wonderful year to plan.
My first exposure, as an adorable child, had been everyone’s: Disney’s Fantasia, the music’s most exquisite realization. Later, when I was fourteen, Chad played me the LP of the whole Nutcracker, not just the suite as in Fantasia. I’d never heard the tarantella before—it was often cut, as was the coda of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” and what remains of the score is presented out of sequence—so to hear it straight through as an orchestral performance was eye-opening. I was hooked.
My first experience of the music as a dancer, on the other hand, had been humiliating. At sixteen or so, as a student with First Chamber, I’d toured the rest homes of Seattle with a nine-person version of the suite. Our version of the Chinese dance was an exact rip-off of Fantasia, so we were mushrooms, our costumes a dome-like phallus, a heavy umbrella. We squatted, then stood up and opened. Traumatic.
IN 1892 IN SAINT PETERSBURG, the Mariinsky premiered Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker on a double bill with Iolanta, a one-act lyric opera of his that was then lost for years. The miracle was that they share precisely the same orchestration, except for a newly minted instrument, the celesta, first unveiled in this production specifically for the Sugar Plum Fairy’s dance. It was, as you can imagine, a lengthy evening. Ironically, it was Iolanta that was the big hit, whereas The Nutcracker disappeared for years without a trace.
The first American production was William Christensen’s for the San Francisco Ballet in 1944—we don’t know whether it was good or not, though it was well reviewed—and it was because of this production that The Nutcracker became a comparatively recent Christmas tradition. The production now known as the “original Nutcracker” is later: Balanchine’s from the late 1950s—the first “full” version I saw, very good if a little dull. People take that as the Bible, the one against which all others are judged, without necessarily realizing that it is itself a weird hybrid, including an interpolation from Sleeping Beauty in the score that doesn’t belong at all. I therefore decided that I’d use the full original score without a single note missing, at Tchaikovsky’s original metronome markings. In Brussels, they’d give it the fullest attention. I wanted my version of The Nutcracker to be interesting, fun, beautiful, scary, and sexy, but above all . . . I just wanted it to make sense.
IN MOST NUTCRACKERS, act 1 is boring—a Christmas party—and act 2 is confusing, and then it’s over. The general reaction, beyond “Oh, we saw some pretty ballerinas!” is incomprehension: “Why is it over? What just happened?”
In fact, what does the audience even see? To start with, they’re not seeing E. T. A. Hoffmann’s original 1816 story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King; they’re seeing a libretto based on Dumas’s greatly sanitized bastardization of 1844, The Story of a Nutcracker. In Tchaikovsky’s ballet, act 1 is generally set in an upper-class drawing room in the late nineteenth century in Düsseldorf, Deutschland, or some fictional Mitteleuropa. There’s a Christmas Eve party peopled by dull adults who scold and swat their fake-naughty children. The centerpiece is the arrival of Drosselmeier, a crazy magician relative, who brings presents—a drum for little Fritz, a Nutcracker doll for Clara, who apparently loves nuts—and delights the kids with cheap magic shop props, including a windup doll. The naughty boys gang up on the adorable girls, and the Nutcracker is broken. The guests yawn simultaneously, and it’s bedtime.
Clara can’t sleep and comes downstairs. She’s miniaturized, the tree becomes enormous, the Nutcracker turns into a soldier (but still a toy), and there’s a big fight between the mice, who live there anyway, and the toy soldiers who are gifts under the tree. The Nutcracker murders the Mouse King, Clara faints, and the soldier becomes the Prince, a human being. It makes absolutely no sense, and that’s when there’s a big pas de deux between a snow lady and a snow gentleman. And curtain.
For act 2, we’re magically in Candyland or Confiturenburg, where there is much excitement about the arrival of the little boy prince and Clara. The Sugar Plum Fairy, self-appointed hostess of the Kingdom of Sweets, welcomes them, and the Prince mimes a précis of act 1, for those who can’t remember or don’t understand what happened before the intermission. Then they sit down and watch the rest of the show, a travelogue of snacks and delicacies from around the world: Arabia is coffee, China is tea, Russia is candy canes, Spain is chocolate (probably much to the chagrin of Belgium), and so forth. Then there’s another big pas de deux, and off they fly in a sleigh.
That’s it. It never goes back to the party. It’s basically two different ballets that make no sense together. Or, in fact, apart.
My first inclination—in my quest for a coherent story—was to turn to Hoffmann’s 1816 original, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which Marius Petipa (Tchaikovsky’s librettist and choreographer) evidently considered way too bizarre for the late nineteenth century. I couldn’t possibly have predicted that it would deliver on every thrilling level, and I wrung everything I could out of that gothic, creepy story to put into my show.
The synopsis, therefore, for my back-to-basics version—for which I decided to use the snappy title The Hard Nut (the name of the story-within-the-story in the original, which is The Nutcracker’s origin myth and the kernel of the tale)—was:
ACT I
Dr. and Mrs. Stahlbaum’s annual Christmas Eve party. Their children, Fritz, Marie, and Louise, wait in the den. Party dances: polka, hokey-pokey, hesitation, stroll, bump, waltz. Friend of the family Drosselmeier brings animated toys that he’s made. He gives a Nutcracker to the children. Fritz breaks it. The children fight. Dr. Stahlbaum changes the subject. The guests go home. The family goes to bed. The housekeeper cleans up.
Marie can’t sleep and comes downstairs to see if the Nutcracker is resting comfortably. At midnight, she is frightened by rats. Everything in the room grows to giant size. G.I. Joes led by the Nutcracker battle rats led by the mutant Rat King. Marie kills the Rat King with her slipper. She falls unconscious. The Nutcracker is transformed into a young man. Marie is tucked in. A worried Drosselmeier makes his way through the blizzard.
ACT II
Marie is in a fever. Drosselmeier comes to see if Marie is resting comfortably and tells her one of his stories:
The Hard Nut
Once upon a time a King and a Queen had a beautiful baby girl named Pirlipat. The Queen’s old enemy the Rat Queen threatened to ruin little Pirlipat. The nurse and the cat were left to guard the baby at night. While the nurse and cat slept, the Rat Queen destroyed Princess Pirlipat’s face. The royal family was horrified by the sight of their formerly beautiful daughter. The Rat Queen explained that the Princess would regain her beauty only after a young man cracked the hard nut, Krakatuk, with his teeth and stepped backward seven times. The King commanded Drosselmeier to find the hard nut or face decapitation. Drosselmeier set off in search of the hard nut. He traveled the world for fifteen years before finding it back at home.
The ugly teenage Pirlipat watched as one young man after another attempted to crack the hard nut. The last one to try was Drosselmeier’s own nephew. He succeeded. On his seventh step backward he stepped on the Rat Queen, killing her. Pirlipat became beautiful and rejected the young Drosselmeier as he started to become ugly—like a nutcracker. . . .
At this point Marie interrupts the story and offers her love to young Drosselmeier. Mrs. Stahlbaum acknowledges her daughter’s new maturity with a flower dance. Everyone in the world joins Marie and young Drosselmeier in celebrating their love. The two go away together forever.
EPILOGUE
Louise and Fritz are sent to bed.
My first thought was to employ Edward Gorey as the designer. I’d worshipped his work since I was thirteen, and when we met, he was wearing his legendary uniform of fur coat and sneakers. He loved dance and liked my work, and he’d recently designed Dracula on Broadway; it was perfect. But I paused. I feared it was the wrong generation, the wrong society, too penny-farthing. I didn’t want it to be gothic or creepy and kooky in the Addams Family way, though I love both Gorey and Addams. I needed a different direction.
Barry, a comic book nut, showed me Charles Burns’s Big Baby. I’d read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, and I’d loved Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, but I was by no means a devotee of comic book culture, which had been around in its groovy new form for some while. I was friends with Lynda Barry, of course, and loved the work of Matt Groening—same period, same Northwest noir—but Burns’s linocut style referred to a much older and more frightening world, the missing link between Reefer Madness and Eraserhead. We were from the same neck of the woods, had contemporaneous childhoods of The Flintstones and Disneyland (when it was genuinely scary), and we therefore shared an esthetic. Barry contacted Burns; we met and I was very enthused. It was love at first sight.
My other collaborators would be old favorites, lighting designer James F. Ingalls, set designer Adrianne Lobel, and costume designer Marty Pakledinaz. I remember shopping at the now defunct Toys“R”Us in Manhattan with Adrianne for the kids’ Christmas presents, all the crappy toys they don’t need. (Someone gets an ugly sweater—the joke there was that we actually used one of Nancy’s real sweaters.) That was the team of criminals gathered for one last Belgian heist: Burns, Lobel, Ingalls, Pakledinaz, Morris. We started synchronizing our diaries and lining up meetings every few months, all over the world—coincidentally, always glamorous cities too. And at these meetings, we came up with ideas as Charles sketched away, and Marty imagined the costumes in Charles’s style. Then we’d disperse, work, think and re-collect.
I didn’t want it set precisely in my family’s Seattle home in the 1970s—we were all in our thirties, remembering that time—but I was already entertaining autobiographical thoughts. Mrs. Stahlbaum would have elements of Verla, and there’d be a touch of Uncle Jim about Drosselmeier. At one point, we were debating whether we should have extreme makeup or even possibly masks. Marty remembered my saying, “This is my company’s goodbye to Brussels. I don’t want to hide their faces.” We’d go out proudly. Besides, if we’d used masks, it would have been as dead as everybody else’s Nutcracker.
The Hard Nut, BAM, 2010. (Stephanie Berger)
WHEN I STARTED MAKING the moves for the party that takes up all of act 1, I assigned partners; everyone was in a couple—she’s with her, these two have been married for twenty years, and so forth. I was the lone drunk, the only sad single at the party. I’d put on the music and we’d improvise with cups and chairs, starting to flirt, and I’d specify things I wanted to happen, like the stroll dance, the hokey-pokey (the suburban version of folk dances from my parents’ time), the bump, and the promenade. As we improvised, people developed relationships. At one point, I asked Penny, “Could we run into each other now, and you maybe hand me a drink?” And she said, “No, I can’t; my husband’s over here and we just had a fight and now I’m coming on to this lesbian over here and we’re just about to . . .” And I said, “Fine, forget it! I’ll find somebody else.” Everybody had a whole life they were living, a fabulously detailed track they were on, of relationship and business, much of which remains. You steal a package when you leave; you play the guitar because you’re the hippie folksinger; you’re the gay one wondering who else is gay; you’re the people who think they’re interesting but they’re really not; you’re the kooky couple who doesn’t fit in; and you’re the one who cries all the time. These decisions became absolutely strict structurally.
The set design has to be done before you can start blocking the moves, and Adrianne had the wonderful idea to make everything backward. In Giselle, to use a classic example, the peasant girl’s house is down right, and her bench where she picks flowers and courts boys is down left, and there’s a ramp at the back that goes off to the forest. The Hard Nut would be the exact opposite of prevailing stage logic. The front door is upstage left, and the bathroom is downstage right beyond the TV. The whole set is beautifully phony, occasioning a lot of pretend peering around to see who’s at the “front” door. The large portals that frame the stage are round. In the Hoffmann, when Marie emerges from the sleeve of her father’s fur coat, she finds herself in a magic pristine winter wonderland. In Brussels, the stage had the sumptuous visual depth afforded by its rake, dangerous to dance on but offering a beautiful telescopy to the eye, which gave an even more penetrative fallopian depth to the designs—“sleeve of her father’s fur coat”: hello! The themes and the set were married from the start.
“The Waltz of the Snowflakes” at the end of act 1 is a high point, as the dancers endlessly leap across the stage, flinging snow. I wanted the tutus Marty designed to look like frozen snowflakes, and he went through a million photographs to find the perfect snowflake, before I reminded him that it didn’t matter because all snowflakes are famously identical. We put as much work into the snow itself as anything else, auditioning every different kind of fake snow yet invented, thinking at first we might be able to get away with some of the crew throwing snow down from above the stage (though it was easy to predict that might look a little underwhelming). And we knew we needed shitloads of snow. The next idea was confetti that the dancers themselves threw. I coincidentally already had them doing the hand movements of “throwing” in the choreography, so we added a fistful of confetti each time. The snow is stored in cardboard boxes in the wings, and the rule is to enter the stage with your hands full and leave with them empty, every single time. It’s part of the choreography. And it’s intense. There’s a real skill to holding and throwing it, to avoid its clumping in the sweat of your palms. Then the entire intermission is spent vacuuming the stage.
Narratively, the main problem is the story within the story in act 2 that gives my dance its name, as Drosselmeier goes around the world looking for the nut, Krakatuk. In other versions, there’s a lot of dancing candy, and the poor kids, for no reason I can think of, have to sit there and watch this boring ballet, usually from the back too. (Why aren’t they in the front, where they can actually see it?) In my version, Drosselmeier asks the people from different countries about the nut. They reply, “I don’t know what nut you’re talking about. I don’t speak whatever language you’re speaking!” and do their national dance, which we made as amusingly obvious as we could. There’s Spain with a female bull and the Frenchiest France you can possibly imagine. The music tells you the whole story. I was the original beautiful Arabian princess, covered from head to foot, tattoos on my face, sunglasses, and a veil. (However, you can’t dance without the use of your eyes, though I suppose I did manage it in The Vacant Chair, so I lost the glasses.)
Some other fun facts: no one ever goes to the bathroom at parties onstage, which is why I emerge from the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. And everyone gets stuck on the cross-sex casting—the maid (played for a quarter of a century by Kraig Patterson), a woman playing Fritz, of course the beautiful snowflakes—and every year straight males in the audience find Mrs. Stahlbaum, played by John Heginbotham, disquietingly attractive. The makeup is so disguising that there’s no way to know who’s who, which makes it unique in our repertory. Nobody looks like himself, and in that way, it’s like a Broadway show, which is also why it’s not the moneymaker some might imagine—the crew is twice as big as the cast. There are only thirty-three dancers in the show, but backstage is even more hectic than onstage—the makeup and costume schedule requires military precision. As a performer, there are certain other performers you might never see at all during the entire production, depending on which track you’re on. Originally, there was a central globe (already a replacement for Charles’s first idea, a gigantic science-fictional throbbing pink brain), but I suggested a Mercator projection map instead, which seemed more appropriate to the period. There was a conscious Wizard of Oz influence in the spiral vortex (used when Marie goes in and out of fantasy) and the way the production switches in and out of color. The prologue is in black and white, then the children change and come back in the same costumes but in color. No one ever notices.
There were a couple of terrible wrong turns. The production is full of rats: the dancing rats, a Rat King, and the remote-controlled rats (which never used to work consistently; we’ve finally figured them out). There’s a battle between the G.I. Joe soldiers (come to life under the tree) and the rats, which are all female dancers because I wanted sexy bare showgirl legs, so they’re vicious mean killer rats with great gams. When I got to creating the battle itself, I wanted it to be somewhat Apocalypse Now, so I had the soldiers raping the rats, fucking them and killing them. Perhaps I was going stir-crazy in Brussels as the date of our release got closer, but at rehearsal, I found myself going full Brando, shouting, “Rape her! Kill her! Fuck her!” until I stopped to think about it for a second. “Wait . . . who am I, Béjart? Am I becoming the enemy? Do I really want to see a rape onstage? That’s why I booed Twyla!” It was a blind alley, one I skipped down for some time. Mercifully, it became the more palatable version it is now.
At the end of my version, Marie stops Drosselmeier’s story—“That’s enough, I’m fine now!”—and that’s when she and young Drosselmeier fall in love, actually as people. Some complained about the ending, finding it anticlimactic that they didn’t have a longer duet. But they don’t have to dance anymore: they’re together, young people in love, dancing forever. It’s their apotheosis and the show’s over. They just get to make out. And that’s as it should be. Almost every dance performance I see is overchoreographed; sometimes I long for a little less.
Misha was meant to dance the role of Fritz, the asshole son. Jon Mensinger was the Prince, Young Drosselmeier, but when I started working on it, Jon got very sick (and ended up dying, as in fact we all do). I promoted Misha to the Nutcracker, but during rehearsal Misha blew out his knee, so Bill Wagner, his understudy, did the part first.
According to Belgium, The Hard Nut liberated me to be my vulgar American self—everything they’d disliked about me from the beginning. I’d wanted to go out with a bang. The surprise, however, was that it was very well received, and not only out of the country’s relief at my imminent departure. L’Allegro had been a smash at the start, though there was backlash. Between these two big hits, the work was largely dismissed, and it had stopped being fun. I prefer fun.
THE HARD NUT was the last full “Mark Morris” production in Brussels, but two months later our Belgian experience came full circle back to Peter Sellars.
The Death of Klinghoffer—John Adams’s second opera and the other Adams/Sellars/Goodman/Morris collaboration following Nixon in China—was a co-commission between the Monnaie and several other opera companies, some of which never presented it. The opera itself concerns the real Leon Klinghoffer, a Jewish American businessman, who, on a cruise with his wife in the Mediterranean in 1985, was shot and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by a group of misguided and terrified young Palestinian terrorists who didn’t know how to hijack things: a terrible situation. Somehow, despite the few people represented in the actual opera, a complicated piece both dramatically and emotionally with a stunningly subtle libretto, the terrorists came to symbolize the entirety of the Palestinian people, and by association Muslims, and there was immediate controversy as to whether it was anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian, and whether it painted the terrorists in an overly generous light.
I’d first met Alice Goodman as the librettist of Nixon in China when she was very pregnant with her daughter Alberta; she wasn’t an Anglican priest yet, she was a Jewish poet who had fallen in love with and married the great English poet Geoffrey Hill, thirty years her senior. She and I spent wonderful times together in the few days that we crossed paths; she was feeding me books and also Geoffrey’s poetry. I visited them several times when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after Alberta, my goddaughter, was born. I have a portrait she drew of me when she was five that depicts a black cone, a spiral, titled Old Tornado. She said that’s what I reminded her of. Geoffrey seemed to like me, though it was at first hard to tell, because he was perhaps the most daunting person I ever met: shaggy, grumpy, quite impossible. I couldn’t tell much about Geoffrey and Alice’s relationship, but they were clearly very fond of each other. She took care of him when he was dying.
Alice wanted someone to bounce her ideas off of, and I found I was getting her texts for the choruses of Klinghoffer before she even sent them to John. I sat on them because I’m not really one to critique someone else’s poetry, and besides, I hadn’t realized that I had a say. These choruses, so concise and fabulous textually, were somehow inspired by her appreciation of my Dido and Aeneas, which she’d seen in Boston, with some of these same Sellars singers. So I’d suggest something, and she’d work on it and then send it on to John. It’s possible this process even delayed things a little.
Unlike with Nixon, the dancers for Klinghoffer were always meant to be my company; John was writing the opera knowing I was going to choreograph it, sending me music as it was being finished, in MIDI (i.e., synthesized digital) form—absolutely the worst way music can ever sound. But that was the least of our problems.
George Tsypin was designing the sets. The entire edifice was sprung metal, the tension such that if a single bolt came loose, the whole Erector set would burst apart. This self-standing structure was conceptually beautiful but so dangerous. It’s my job to protect the people I’m working with, and I told Peter that my dancers were never leaving the floor, that I wouldn’t have them dance on the scaffolding. If he wanted to stage singers up there, fine, but no dancers. I also insisted that my dancers wear shoes: any debris on that floor (metal shavings, screws), and they’d be fucked.
The story itself demands wheelchairs and guns, so because I’m me, I asked Peter if he’d consider using neither wheelchairs nor guns. A show about wheelchairs and guns doesn’t have to resort to wheelchairs and guns. So I wasn’t happy when, on the very first day of rehearsal for the presentation of the designs, there was a fleet of wheelchairs and a table laden with a considerable arsenal. But we kept winnowing away at them during rehearsals, and opening night featured one sole wheelchair for Leon Klinghoffer (played by Sanford Sylvan), who was actually in a wheelchair, so that was somewhat unavoidable, and a few guns wrapped in fabric; gun-shaped gifts.
I choreographed only the choruses, which were written specifically for me. Peter, as is his wont, used my dancers as doubles for the characters—the dancing Mrs. Klinghoffer, the dancing Palestinian Terrorist—and I didn’t take part in that at all. I’ve never liked that device. If he wanted to take my moves and use them elsewhere in his staging, then of course he was welcome, but it was distinctly agreed that I wouldn’t participate in the character doubling, and there was no acrimony about it whatsoever. There were a lot of beautiful, complicated choruses anyway, and the rest of the time the dancers huddled around, scared passengers on the cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. Ironically, I therefore got credit for one of the best-remembered pieces of movement, apparently the most moving part of the show, when Klinghoffer’s body falls over the side of the boat in a wheelchair. Peter staged it with Klinghoffer’s body double, one of my dancers, Keith, lowered on a wire from the flies onto a tarpaulin that somebody then slowly dragged offstage. This was attributed to me, but Keith worked on it with Peter separately.
Dancers learn music from hearing it over and over. They generally know it better than the chorus and orchestra. On tour in Vienna at the Messepalast (a big horse stable of a theater), the orchestra, under the baton of Kent Nagano, who took the music at breakneck speed, broke down in rehearsal. As the band ground to a halt, my dancers (to my delight, and Kent’s dismay) kept dancing and singing, because they’d been doing both for months, and that’s what they’d do to keep going if it were one of our company rehearsals. Kent was trying to get everyone to stop, but my dancers were still spinning and singing at the same time: fabulous.
Klinghoffer was a very pleasurable and satisfying experience, but controversial simply because it didn’t say “Death to all Palestinians,” which made it pro-Palestinian. The controversy was far deeper than Nixon, because the Klinghoffer family, the daughters, got tangled up in it, and protestors (including Rudy Giuliani) were still demonstrating against the opera in 2014 when it received its first performance at the Met.
The first productions arrived with a prologue consisting of a thirty-minute scene at the Klinghoffers’ friends’ house, where they’re having coffee and talking about the news and their friends, the Klinghoffers. This presentation of everyday privileged New Jersey Jews was very much part of the controversy, for reasons of its possible anti-Semitism. I didn’t much like it either, but for structural reasons. This half-hour slice of life might have made a good one-act opera, but it started the show quite wrong. I wondered whether I should mention it, and finally I felt moved to. It turned out everyone agreed, and it was cut. The opera now started with the chorus of exiled Palestinians as the downbeat of the piece, the chorus singing directly at the audience, a powerful beginning. It had been a mistake of balance (as though perhaps John was writing it in sequence); now the symmetry was much better. I thought the opera was very well argued and in no way anti-Semitic.
Alice and John had big fights. She and Peter had little fights, because he doesn’t fight. There was a plan for further tripartite collaborations—to complete the trilogy of Adams’s contemporary issue operas with Doctor Atomic—but by then Alice had become a poet priestess (or poetess priest, or poet priest), and it didn’t happen. Peter asked me to choreograph Doctor Atomic, but I chose not to, partly because Alice was no longer involved. Peter put together his own libretto, a pastiche of primary material and John Donne—he often adds other text from diverse sources. I suggested Lucinda Childs, who did a great job.
John used to ask me why I didn’t choreograph more of his music. My reply: “I choreographed Nixon in Fucking China and The Death of Fucking Klinghoffer! What more can I do?” He later, in 2008, wrote a piece for me for the San Francisco Ballet and the new music group Alarm Will Sound, called Son of Chamber Symphony, for which the name of my dance was Joyride. Again I was on the receiving end of John’s handwritten manuscript and those unlistenable MIDI recordings. I was in the Bay Area working on it—frankly, he was a little bit behind (shocking though it might be that a composer would be tardy)—and I’d call him up at his house in the Berkeley Hills, because I’d caught up choreographically, and ask, “Hey, John, do you have any more music? How do you get me out of this?” and he’d say, “I’ll finish it this afternoon and get it right to you.” The ink was wet on the page when it arrived. It was a close call, the closest yet, and somehow it worked out.
I don’t work with directors anymore, but working with Peter did the opposite of putting me off opera. It only made me think, “If I’m going to choreograph it, I have to direct it. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.”
But perhaps one day we’ll do The Pajama Game.
WE WEREN’T RIDDEN OUT of Belgium on a rail. We served out our contract, and when we finally left, Mortier, who’d been in my corner throughout, sold us sets and costumes and performance rights (that he could have denied us) on the cheap. We had to ship the sets home, which cost the earth, but it was a real kindness on his part.
If someone offered me the same opportunity again, I’d do it—but in a different way. I’d be like a traveling music director. I’d run a company in another city, but I wouldn’t take my whole company. I’d recruit new dancers and direct them while we continued our work at home. Ironically, that may have been what Mortier was originally suggesting. He was probably right, as he generally was. I was stubborn.
I’ve never set foot in Belgium since. I’ve never even been through the Brussels airport, Zaventem. And I won’t.