Perhaps it wasn't quite as big a debut as Nehemiah Kish dancing Peter/the Prince for the first time in the National Ballet of Canada's production of The Nutcracker, but hey, everything is relative. On Sunday evening, my daughter Louisa and I made our debuts as cannon dolls on the same stage on which Sonia Rodriguez played the Sugar Plum Fairy and Rebekah Rimsay danced the part of the bee. Who cares if it was also our last appearance? We were pretty excited at the time and we are still dreaming, if not of sugar plums, then of standing ovations, bravos and bouquets landing at our feet.
As far back as founding artistic director Celia Franca's day, the National Ballet has invited a variety of non-dancers to play walk-on parts in their annual holiday production of The Nutcracker. Her version demanded brawn: The guests were cast as stretcher bearers and required to carry the Mouse King off stage after his unsuccessful battle with the cats at the end of Act One.
When Reid Anderson became artistic director of the National, he asked James Kudelka to re-interpret The Nutcracker, giving him licence to do whatever he wanted so long as he incorporated the following three criteria: The ballet had to be beautiful, give off the smell of cinnamon and include walk-on parts for local personalities. Kudelka knew Franca's Nutcracker well -- he had danced in it for the first time as a nine-year-old student at the National Ballet School.
His version, which premiered in 1995, is set in Russia and socially down-scaled from an aristocratic salon to a barn. He made the choreography much more complex, ramped up the male parts -- a signature of his ballets -- doubled the number of children on stage, updated the production values to include a bear on roller blades, a Sugar Plum Fairy who lives inside a Fabergé egg and a mouse czar, and turned what was essentially a little girl's fantasy into a morality tale about squabbling siblings. Alas, there is no discernible smell of cinnamon, but in every other respect it fulfills Anderson's commands. The ballet is beautiful and has roles for two non-dancing cannon dolls, played every night by different guests. Instead of brawn, they're supposed to generate laughs by clowning around with a real dancer from the NBC.
I spent about five minutes worrying about conflict of interest when a letter arrived in November from Kudelka inviting me (and a partner) to play the cannon dolls in this year's run of The Nutcracker. A glance at the list of former dolls showed that I would be in the same company as politicians Bob Rae and David Tsubouchi, comedian Mike Bullard and journalists Lisa LaFlamme and Evan Solomon.
Thinking I might finally derive some retroactive benefit from all the ballet lessons I had dragged my daughter to as a little girl, I asked her to be my partner. Besides, dancing -- well, appearing is more accurate -- certainly beats shopping as a mother/daughter activity. As the day of our performance approached, though, we both got a little twitchy.
After all, the NBC has had real stars playing the cannon dolls. Earlier this month, former Toronto Leafs players Doug Gilmour and Steve Thomas were part of the cast for the Share the Magic performance, a program that invites children through agencies such as Inner City Angels and Toronto Child Abuse Centre to watch a dress rehearsal of The Nutcracker. NBC Publicity Manager Sally Szuster said it was the first time that she had ever heard the audience chant "Dou-gie Dou-gie" at the Hummingbird Centre.
So, like any self-respecting journalist, I started researching cannon dolls. I wasn't certain which terrified me more, disrobing in front of all those fit and supple dancers or prancing about on stage before an audience of total strangers. Who better to ask for advice than Rick Mercer? He and his CBC-TV's Monday Report colleague Daryn Jones had played the Russian Petruchka dolls on Saturday night.
"You know that you have to pick which cannon doll you get to play?" he said in a telephone conversation early on Sunday afternoon. "There are two."
"Is one bigger?" I asked, still thinking about the costumes.
"They are both the same size," he replied, "but, of course, the question I asked is, 'Who gets the bigger laughs?' One cannon doll is meek and afraid and the other one is gung ho and wants to see the cannon blow up."
"Which one did you pick?"
"The meek, afraid one. When the cannon goes off, the afraid one can fall down. My advice to you is to fall down. When you don't know what to do -- fall down."
"Did they laugh and clap for you?"
"They were very generous off the top when they announced I was going to be playing the part of the cannon doll, but yes, we got some laughs and claps. Some of the audience are 3, so I don't know if they were clapping at me or the pretty colours."
"How do the costumes fit?" I persisted. "Do they have a range of sizes?"
"One size fits all. I was wearing whatever Doug Gilmour was wearing the day before and I guess you will be wearing whatever I wore."
"Well, I hope you had a bath," I blurted like an idiot.
He had the grace to laugh before giving me a final piece of advice: "Wear comfortable shoes."
"Try telling that to my daughter," I retorted before saying goodbye. "She has 71 pairs of shoes, 90 per cent of them stilettos."
Thus prepared, I decided I would command the role of the meek cannon doll -- after all, age should have some rewards -- and let my daughter be my macho counterpart.
I told her about Mercer's tip about comfortable shoes and she reluctantly agreed to bring along a pair of gold ballet slippers although she insisted on wearing her version of nine-inch nails to the Hummingbird Centre. I also passed on a warning about the burgeoning Christmas tree from Elle Canada editor Rita Silvan. She'd wandered too close to the fake fir and been whacked hard by sprouting branches as she was making her entrance.
We found the stage door and introduced ourselves to the man at the security desk, who smiled broadly and said, "Now the show can begin, if the cannon dolls are here." From that moment on everybody soothed and cosseted us, especially Nathaniel Kozlow, the member of the corps de ballet who was in charge of getting us on and off the stage without bringing the performance to a halt.
I expected to hear my daughter berate me for letting her quit ballet lessons after two years of tears and tantrums. Not a word. Instead she kept up a running commentary on the hotness quotient of the male ballet dancers.
Ballet master Peter Ottmann rehearsed us and showed us a video of previous cannon dolls. Kozlow kept telling us we would be great and to stick with him as he wheeled the cannon on stage. When the moment came, we strode out on stage into the blackness of the lights. I panicked for a moment, reverted to journalist mode and reached metaphorically for my notebook. But Kozlow kept us going.
My daughter leapt about, looking more exuberant than ferocious. I was afraid to fall down, in case I wouldn't be able to get up again on cue, and opted for a Perils of Pauline-style pantomime routine. Kozlow fired the cannon, the audience clapped. We preened, he said, "Come on," and off we went to the side of the stage to mime some more until the curtain came down on the first act.
Wisely, that was it for our first and probably only appearance with the National Ballet. We hugged and congratulated each other, found the seats that had been reserved for us in the audience and settled in to watch the second act, much to the discomfiture of the people behind us who had enjoyed an unobstructed view of the stage for the first half of the performance.
"What happened?" asked the man in the seat behind me. "Were you really late or did you have seats somewhere else?"
"No," I replied with a tinge of hauteur. "We were on stage. We played the cannon dolls." And then my daughter and I smiled graciously and accepted their congratulations on a job well done. This star thing could become addictive.
The Nutcracker continues at Toronto's Hummingbird Centre through Dec. 29.