This past winter, Ballet Theatre of Scranton celebrated the 50th anniversary of their version of The Nutcracker, which they have been performing free for Northeastern Pennsylvania audiences for over 50 years. “They are always booked solid, people can't get in, and tickets are unavailable. After this past winter, when they did the 50th, the board of directors said, we should capitalize on our “Nutcracker,” the business we get, how many people want to see the show, and how many people love the music,” explains lighting designer Dennis Size. “So the artistic director said, you know what? Why don't we reimagine it at a different time, in a different place? The music is still the same. Right?”
Check out the light plot and gear list for The Cracked Nut
So artistic director Joanne Arduino took the original Tchaikovsky score, added re-mixed jazz versions of that familiar classical music by Glenn Miller, Brian Seltzer, with vocalizations by Pentatonix, and created her Spring Senior production of The Cracked Nut, set in a 1940’s New York City swing club. “The Theatre at North that’s the home of BTOS was the historic, Gothic Revival North Scranton Junior High School. Many, many years ago, it was shut down. About 15 years ago, Goodwill Industries of Northeast PA took the building over and converted it into housing for senior citizens, turning all of the classrooms into apartments in addition to restoring the 800 seat theatre space,” says Size. “During this time a lot of these large school theaters were being converted, but funds were lacking to to do a fully modern automated conversion with LED fixtures, so they ended up installing dimmers and conventional ETC Source Fours, things like that. But it's really a touring ‘roadhouse, you know, like so many of these smaller town theaters that do cover bands and one-off things like that.”
The Ballet Theatre of Scranton has made this space their home, where they now do six or seven shows a year between the children’s company, the annual Christmas performances, and, in the spring, traditional classics and original new works that are performed by their senior company, often with professional dancers brought in. "The theatre keeps a rep plot hanging, and BTOS owns a fair amount of equipment that they purchased over the years, that are ‘gently used’ LED fixtures. There's about 40 moving lights in the rig that they own,” Size points out. “Because of the nature of this production, I added another eight fixtures from High End Systems, the new Halcyon Silent, because I wanted a lot of heavy-duty side light, so I added four on each side; there's two in-one and two in-two, to give me a solid amount of high quality, intense side light, with the added option of bright color and a lot of gobos for texture and movement. The stage is only about 25 feet deep, but has a large apron. The overall design is a mixed hybrid hang of moving lights that are LEDs and the ellipoidals and PARs that are tungsten quartz."
For the LD, “the actual difference, interestingly enough, between The Nutcracker in Scranton and The Cracked Nut, in which a lot of the blocking was similar, was influenced by the different style of music. The jazz music dictated a more contemporary and often percussive choreography. Which led to a much different tone in the lighting design. The differences affected the quality of the light. This production is a much heavier sidelit show – with a very different color palette. InThe Nutcracker there are more warm ambers and straws in the living room scenes, accented by a great deal of white light, and with the use of softer more pastel blues for scenes like the snow ballet. But in this show, especially because of the color tonality of the drops, everything went more pink and fuchsia with saturated lavenders and blues, which I found to be more romantic for the story/period. The use of intense white textured sidelight, really burned through the fuchsias, and it was quite a lovely mix, as it turned out. The colors were also driven by beautiful costumes.”
Size, who admits to being a child dancer (50 years ago) with Ballet Theatre of Scranton, where he grew up, designed his first ballet for the company 30 years ago and usually lights their professional show in the spring. He often goes in the winter to remount The Nutcracker, if he has time, “because it's a show I redesigned for them, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago. During the pandemic – so Scranton audiences could still receive their free gift of The Nutcracker – BTOS performed it as a video, taped by Keystone Pictures of Philadelphia, which I re-lit for the camera. It was presented to the public at a local drive-in movie then on Northeastern PA television via the local FOX affiliate (WOLF), who still airs the production at Christmas,” he says.
“The sound bite is everybody loves The Nutcracker, and that's why they reimagined this as their spring production – they wanted to do something new instead of doing a traditional dead lady ballet,” notes Size., who is primarily known as a television designer and VP at The Lighting Design Group in NYC. “I've probably done 20, 25 ballets for them over the last 30 years, however long I've been collaborating with Miss Joanne. Every now and then, they do something new and original, bringing in a guest choreographer from South America, or England, or some resident ballet company in the country… and it's always fun doing an original ballet.”
Because Scranton is the anthracite coal capital of the world, Size suggested for one of the scenes: “wouldn't it be neat if the dancing soldiers had those old World War I helmets, but similar to what miners wore with lights affixed to the top … but bright LED headlamps. That became the light source for the fight between the Rat King and the Nutcracker Soldier – which Arduino conceived of as a tap dance duel. When the rats come out of the sewer, they are also wearing gloves, with each finger also having LEDs affixed, and the light shooting out of their hands. They enter from the back of the house in total blackout, crawling all over the audience, clad in the most wonderfully outrageous costumes. All these LEDs were shooting all over the place on the dancers, into the audience, onto the ceiling. We would also sporadically flash the Halcyon Silent fixtures, creating a startling stroboscopic effect during the tap dance.”
And all this is done for just two performances! “They load everything in on a Monday. I usually go in on Tuesday, hang, finish the hang, do the focus, Wednesday is blocking and spacing, Thursday is dress rehearsal, Friday the first show,” notes Size.
“My associate and super programmer, Lesli Tilly, is really exceptional. How she gets it all together on her ION Xe is a mystery to me. Basically, we call it our ballet theater family, and a lot of us go in to Scranton just to do this every spring,” concludes the LD. “We take a week to escape from real work, and we're off and running to create vacation art. That's just lovely.”