Updated October 26, 2026 — 2:18pm, first published October 21, 2026 — 11:04am
DANCE
The Nutcracker ★★★★
The Australian Ballet, Ian Potter State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne, until October 31
The State Theatre has reopened after 2½ years of renovations, and Arts Centre Melbourne is keen to reassure audiences that its familiar character survives. The Australian Ballet has taken the hint, returning home with Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker, created for Birmingham Royal Ballet in 1990: an old favourite offering reassurance on a suitably extravagant scale.
Yuumi Yamada as Clara in The Nutcracker. Kate Longley John F. Macfarlane’s gigantic, dreamy designs seem almost to have grown out of the theatre. The Stahlbaums’ drawing room, swathed in dark red curtains, extends the auditorium’s crimson plush into the family Christmas party. With festive decorations glistering like seams of emerald in the shadows, the whole experience feels deliciously subterranean: a theatre and a household tucked into the same deep burrow. We’re all here underground together.
Yuumi Yamada supplies the youthful enthusiasm this cosy fantasy needs. Her Clara, a ballet student dreaming herself into a ballerina, is eager, unguarded and winsomely adolescent, and her delight in everything has an attractive freedom. Jarryd Madden’s fatherly Drosselmeyer offers a steadying presence.
The finest enchantment in this version remains Wright’s reimagined version of the Dance of the Snowflakes at the end of the first act, led here by Isobelle Dashwood’s graceful Snow Fairy.
On Saturday night, the second act sometimes felt rushed. The national dances were briskly dispatched, and the Waltz of the Flowers grew a little unruly, the ensemble’s lines scattering beneath Macfarlane’s overhead tangle of streamers. Intentional or otherwise, the visual rhyme was actually quite enjoyable: the flowers and their consorts seemed to have caught the delirium of the decoration. But the entrance of Sharni Spencer’s queenly Sugar Plum Fairy soon restored order.
The battle beneath the Christmas tree impresses. Kate Longley The theatre itself still smells new. The seats are a considerable improvement, although the space between rows feels even more miserly than before. The additional aisles do, however, offer more accessibility. The gridlock in the stalls after the curtain comes down is now, I hope, a thing of the past. The acoustics require a more cautious verdict after one visit, but, still, Orchestra Victoria –
Read More