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When customers at the New York City Ballet dug into the warehouse to reveal their “Nutcracker” costumes in September, they noticed something wrong with the silver bells that adorned their pink and green striped candy cane outfits: They were rusty.
During the months when the city was battling the worst waves of the coronavirus, Lincoln Center went unused, and building management shut down controlled air in the basement of the David H. Koch Theater, where the “Nutcracker” costumes were kept.
City Ballet has been playing “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” in more or less the same costumes for over 60 years. Today’s Candy Cane costumes mostly look the same as when Balanchine made the ballet debut in 1954. So, when the company returned from a year without the “Nutcracker”, there was hope that it could dust off the Rat heads, shake off the soldiers’ uniforms and go back to the way things were in the old days.
The rusty bells turned out to be the least of the City Ballet’s problems.
With the ongoing threat of a pandemic, the company has decided that 2021 “The Nutcracker” will be performed by a fully grafted cast, which – when they decided a few months ago – meant that there would be no dancers under the age of 12. allowed, and about three-quarters of each child roster needs to be replaced. These roles had to be filled by older kids, and older meant longer, meaning the costumes in the warehouse wouldn’t work.
For the first time since the production’s premiere, the City Ballet costume shop had to make around 130 costumes from scratch: exclusive toy Soldiers, glittering Angels in Hula-Hoop skirts, sassy Candy Canes, boys and girls in Victorian outfits.
City’s Ballet costume director Marc Happel sat in the costume shop a week before the production’s first dress rehearsal in November. “From day one, we were automatically left behind,” he said.
The shop wasn’t just supposed to make dozens of costumes for older, taller dancers—some the size of professionals in corps de ballet—that could be easily changed into smaller, undersized forms. Skirts needed cleverly concealed seams that could be tailored to fit a smaller dancer next year; corsets needed shortcuts to shrink the waist.
However, the silver lining was that Happel had a clean slate and a substantial budget, which totaled about $375,000. She decided to make a change she had thought about for a long time: to return to the original designs of Russian-born designer Barbara Karinska, who has been associated with the City Ballet from the beginning.
“I always try to get back to what Karinska was doing at the costume shop here,” Happel said. “That’s my job: to honor him as best we can.”
Happel’s assistant, Joseph Shrope, set out to identify what details had been lost in Karinska’s designs from decades of remodeling and redesigns. At the Stahlbaums’ Christmas Eve party, she focused on what she called the Party Girls, the young guests chattering dizzily with each other and gleefully pulling on their skirts.
starting with Shrope Karinska’s sketches, preserved in the digital collections of the New York Public Library, and traced their development through production photographs and video footage of televised performances. He noticed that the color of the dresses had evolved from the dustier, pastel palette of the 1950s, and that some design beauty had faded over the decades.
“It’s like the girl in the cape,” said Shrope, pointing to a costume with a slightly embellished cape that jutted out from her shoulders, “it disappears forever after 1968. We never see that costume again.”
Happel and Shrope have brought back the original color palette and details that viewers might not have noticed but that added a thoughtful flair to the dresses: capes, scalloped hem on some skirts, box pleated sleeves and ribbons lining the white blooms.
In creating a new collection, it was also Shrope’s job to track down the raw materials used by previous curtains to make the costumes.
However, he discovered that some of the trusted suppliers no longer exist. The man who handcrafted the pom-poms had died during the pandemic, so Shrope had to find someone else to make the golden poufs that adorned the costumes of Polichinelles, the young dancers who emerged from Mother Ginger’s giant skirt in act two. (A pom-pom maker in New Jersey passed the test.) Shrope also found a supplier for stainless steel rust-proof silver bells.
Creating that many costumes was more than City Ballet’s own costume department could handle, so she outsourced some of the work to other stores, including Arel Studio in the clothing district and Parsons-Meares in Long Island City, Queens. An independent costume manufacturer in Pennsylvania.
At Parsons-Meares, the craftsmen had to set aside their “Hamilton” and “The Lion King” orders so they could focus on completing their 24 Angels, 16 Candy Canes, and 12 Party Girls costumes, as well as dresses and nightgowns. for the young heroine Marie.
Sally Ann Parsons, who opened the shop with her husband in 1980, was wary of taking on more business at a time when every performing arts organization in town needed new and modified costumes for the reopening.
But Happel convinced him with his vision of returning to the original Karinska designs. As a teenager, Parsons was a fan of Balanchine’s City Ballet and watched performances from cheap balcony seats. He liked Karinska’s costumes, but had not had a chance to work with him. (Karinska died in 1983, at 97.)
“This has become an opportunity to work indirectly with Barbara Karinska,” Parsons said one mid-November afternoon as her employees rush through the workshop busy with their “Nutcracker” creations.
In an airy study filled with vintage sewing machines and high shelves full of fabrics, craftsmen sew, pin, sew, stepping away from mannequins to admire their work.
“I feel like a very busy Victorian tailor,” said Patricia Murphy as she put together the fabric for the sleeve of Marie’s mint green party dress. His dog Tazzy chasing a spider at his feet.
While examining an unfinished pumice skirt pinned to a mannequin, Shrope pointed to a 1964 drawing that lay on the counter for comparison. “It will end up looking just like Karinska’s sketch,” he said.
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