Which ‘Nutcracker’ is for you? Making sense of dueling productions of a holiday classic

In the 48-hour period spanning the weekend of Dec. 21 and 22, there will be no fewer than nine live performances of a 130-year-old classical ballet piece known as “The Nutcracker” taking place in Santa Cruz County. Curiously, all nine will begin with the sun still in the sky on what are literally the shortest days of the calendar year. 

If the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is an itch that you have to scratch each December, trying to figure out which performance to see might bring on the same kind of vertigo that inevitably goes with holiday shopping. So, let’s try to make it easier. You might want to have a pad and pencil ready.

“The Nutcracker” is coming to us from two different dance organizations in two different venues, the Civic Auditorium in downtown Santa Cruz and the Crocker Theater on the campus of Cabrillo College. But each company is presenting its performances at the exact same times: 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday and then again on Sunday. And the ninth? That’s what’s known as “The Petite Nutcracker,” in which the dancers are in the preschool demographic. That one’s at the Civic at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 21.

Just to make matters a bit more confusing, both dance companies have similar names and both are offshoots from other separate companies. And all this comes after — as we reported in July — the closing of Santa Cruz’s most venerable dance institution, the Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre, which had each year been presenting “The Nutcracker” with a full orchestra at the Civic for generations. 

So — and here’s where you might want to take notes — the Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre is out of the picture this year. Into the breach steps two other companies: the Santa Cruz City Ballet at the International Academy of Dance, whose production “Nutcracker: Experience The Magic” will take place at the Crocker (as it has since 2009); and Santa Cruz Dance Theater, a new entity spun off from the already established Agape Dance Academy, which picks up where the now-defunct SCBT ballet academy leaves off, presenting four shows at the Civic, plus “The Petite Nutcracker” the morning of Dec. 21. 

To keep them straight, let’s call them the “Crocker Nut” and the “Civic Nut.” Both productions are staging ambitious and traditional versions of “The Nutcracker,” involving scores of performers, technical crew, staff and volunteers. 

The artistic director behind the Crocker Nut is Shannon Chipman whose local “Nutcracker” bonafides go all the way back to 1988 when, as a young dancer, she played the role of Snow Queen in one of the first productions of the ballet in Santa Cruz. She and her partner at the dance company, Vicki Bergland, are shepherding to the stage a production that features more than 100 performers, from ages 4 to adult. 

Mainly because she and her enormous cast and crew have been putting on the ballet at the Crocker for more than a decade now, Chipman says the production’s infrastructure of volunteers and staff runs like a “well-oiled machine.” The backstage environment is almost as impressive to behold as what happens on stage, she said.

“Some of the younger dancers are only in one part, but some of the adult dancers have multiple parts and that’s quite something how they do their quick changes. Just seeing how all the dancers help each other out and how well-organized it is,” she said. “That has less to do with me than with all these amazing volunteers and performers that we have, who have just risen to the occasion to make things work.”

However much the production carries on under its own momentum, Chipman said that “The Nutcracker” presents a big challenge every year. “You would think it would be like, you know, plug and play,” but it’s not, she said. 

The Civic Nut is brought to the stage under the leadership of another longtime dancer and director, Conrad Useldinger, whose mother, Melanie Useldinger, serves as the artistic director of Agape, the training part of the company. Under the new name Santa Cruz Dance Theater, Conrad Useldinger is hoping to shift his focus more toward producing shows rather than teaching dance. That means, though Agape has mounted its own productions of “The Nutcracker” over the years, this marks the debut effort of Santa Cruz Dance Theater.

The cast for the Civic Nut numbers about 70 performers, including veteran dancer Lucien Postlewaite, who grew up and trained in ballet in Santa Cruz and is now principal dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. Postlewaite has been performing in “The Nutcracker” for years as an outside guest artist in productions from the now-defunct Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre. He is one of several guest performers in the production.

Besides staging new productions of “The Nutcracker” every year, Useldinger has other ambitions for his new spinoff dance company, including establishing an annual summer dance festival to begin in 2026. The festival, he said, will focus on bringing in notable dance companies from around the world to Santa Cruz, “so we don’t have to travel to see really incredible world dance.”

On top of that, he is looking to cultivate young local artists to develop their chops as choreographers with an eye toward a career in dance: “I just started this thing called the Composers Forum because composition and choreography, those are really my favorite things in the world.”

What unites these two different companies and their two different “Nutcrackers,” as well as the defunct SCBT, is a woman named Jean Dunphy, the godmother of classical dance in Santa Cruz. Almost 50 years ago, Dunphy opened The Studio, which soon spawned Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre. Eventually, she bequeathed the ballet academy to dancers Robert Kelley and Diane Cypher. In the process, among the hundreds of dancers/choreographers/directors Dunphy trained were Shannon Chipman and Vicki Bergland, who went on to run the International Academy of Dance, as well as Melanie and Conrad Useldinger, who went on to form Agape. 

In that way, said Chipman, these mildly confusing co-running “Nutcracker” productions aren’t so much competitors as reflections of a dance culture sparked by one woman.

“There’s just a very strong community of ballet here,” said Chipman. “And it’s not really about the competition [for audiences]. It’s about us all doing the best we can [to keep] these traditions alive.”

Tickets for the Santa Cruz Dance Theater production of “The Nutcracker” are now on sale. Tickets for Santa Cruz City Ballet’s “Nutcracker: Experience the Magic” can be found here.

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