Rats in Toyland

“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...well, okay, maybe a rat,” says Nancy Smith, founder and artistic director of Boulder’s aerial dance troupe Frequent Flyers Productions. “In our version of The Nutcracker, the Rat King wins and Clara goes flying through Rat World. Instead of interacting with the Sugar Plum Fairy, she’ll meet the Sugar Rum Fairy and the Candy Dandy. It’s a great alterna-tive to all that sticky-sweet holiday stuff, and a great reprieve from the traditional balletic Nutcracker.” Smith and her Frequent Flyers first created the high-flying Ratcracker in 2002, built around music from Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite, and performed it as a holiday program through 2004. “It’s been six years, and now that the company has grown, we wanted to try a new take on it,” Smith says. “We’ve built a wonderful new set so we could move all over it, and added new apparatus including a fly-ing bed, bungee cords, trapeze, Spanish webs, fabric, and rope and harness. We’ve also added new roles for 23 of our apprentice members, including three little kids from our classes for eight- to ten-year-olds. I don’t know if they could be any cuter.” Ratcracker opens tonight at 7 p.m. at the Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut Street in Boulder, and runs through next weekend, with Friday and Saturday shows at 7 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. For tickets, $20, and more information, call 303-444-7328 or visit www.frequentflyers.org.
Fridays, Saturdays, 7 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Starts: Dec. 10. Continues through Dec. 19, 2010